No more voluntary surrenders before unconnected magistrates, orders High Court

Madras High Court prohibits suspects in heinous crimes from avoiding police custody by surrendering before distant magistrates.

Suspects in heinous crimes cannot avoid police custody anymore by surrendering before judicial magistrates in far away districts. Similarly, notorious criminals cannot follow the modus operandi of making unconnected individuals surrender before such magistrates to divert the investigation, thanks to the Madras High Court.

The High Court on Friday ordered that henceforth all judicial magistrates in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry should not remand in judicial custody persons who surrender voluntarily in connection with criminal cases investigated at police stations located outside the territorial jurisdiction of those magistrates.

Justice N. Anand Venkatesh held such practice, in vogue for decades together, as illegal. He said, the magistrates could invoke their power to remand under Section 167(2) of the Code of Criminal Procedure only when the suspects are produced by the police and not when they surrender voluntarily.

“In the event an accused voluntarily appears before a Magistrate having no jurisdiction to try the case, it would be open to the Magistrate to direct the Station House Officer of the nearest police station under his jurisdiction to take the accused into custody and deal with him in accordance with the Police Standing Orders,” he said.

The Police Standing Orders empower such Station House Officer to arrest the suspect, if the offence was of a serious nature and there was an apprehension of him absconding, and produce him before the jurisdictional magistrate with due intimation to the police station where the investigation was pending.

The judge made it clear that the directions issued by him to the magistrates, with respect to voluntary surrender, would apply only to cases booked under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and not under special laws such as the Customs Act, 1962 and Foreign Exchange Management Act, 1999 since those procedures were different.

Ordering the judicial magistrates in the State and the Union Territory to follow his directions scrupulously, Justice Venkatesh directed the High Court’s Registrar General to place his order before Chief Justice Sanjay V. Gangapurwala and circulate it to all the judicial officers after due approval.