On 1 April 2026, a two-judge bench applied Mihir Shah to an NDPS arrest, holding that failure to supply written grounds of arrest before remand renders the arrest illegal even where section 37 ordinarily forecloses bail.
On 22 April 2026, the Supreme Court held that the mandatory bail conditions under section 480(3) BNSS apply only to non-bailable offences punishable with imprisonment of seven years or more, correcting widespread trial-court template practice.
On 9 January 2026, a two-judge bench held that mandating medical age-determination at the bail stage in POCSO matters is impermissible and urged the Centre to consider a 'Romeo–Juliet' clause for close-in-age consensual relationships.
On 28 August 2024, the Supreme Court granted bail to Prem Prakash — an associate of the then-Chief Minister of Jharkhand — in a Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 matter, after he had spent over a year in custody. The judgment reaffirmed the constitutional principle that 'bail is the rule, jail is the exception' in PMLA cases, held statements made by an accused while in PMLA custody to be inadmissible against him under Section 50 PMLA, and continued the post-Vijay Madanlal arc in which the Court has moderated the operation of the twin bail conditions where prolonged incarceration meets the proportionality test of liberty. A digest of the holding, the doctrinal frame, and where the PMLA bail line stands now.
On 27 July 2022, a three-judge bench led by Justice A.M. Khanwilkar upheld substantially all the contested provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 — the arrest power under Section 19, the provisional attachment power under Section 5, the search-and-seizure architecture under Section 17, the reverse-burden provision under Section 24, and the twin bail conditions under Section 45. The judgment also held that an Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR) is not equivalent to an FIR and need not be supplied to the accused. A digest of the holdings, the doctrinal contributions, and the review now pending.
A year into the operation of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, the practitioner-level architecture is now substantially visible. The Supreme Court's April 2026 disposition in Narayan v. State of Madhya Pradesh settled the s.480(3) bail-condition question. Section 187(3)'s fragmentary-custody architecture has produced a competing High Court line — the Kulkarni interpretation against the Senthil Balaji line — without a definitive Article 141 resolution. The s.482 discretion has widened, on the Chhattisgarh High Court's reading. Trial in absentia under s.356, the s.183 recording-of-statements architecture, and the s.367–369 protective regime for accused with intellectual disability have each produced their own developing doctrine. This piece reads the year's jurisprudence as one practitioner architecture.
As the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita completes its first year in force, the early picture on bail, default bail and police-station procedure is taking shape. A practitioner's scan of where the new Code has settled and where it has not.
The Supreme Court's 2014 ruling that arrest in offences carrying up to seven years is not a clerical reflex — and the checklist its bench wrote into the working life of every station-house officer. A close digest, with the directions verbatim and a reading on how they travel onto BNSS s. 35.
On 29 May 2026, a Bench led by the Chief Justice issued the most prescriptive set of timeline directions ever placed on the High Courts in relation to pronouncing reserved judgments. A close reading of the directions, the escalation mechanism, and what they mean for the litigant on the other side of a reserved order.
Bhagwati J.'s 1979 directions ordered the release of thousands of undertrials who had been in custody longer than the sentence the offence carried — and, in doing so, read speedy trial into Article 21. A close digest of the reasoning, with a reading on how it now constrains pre-trial detention under the BNSS.