Last verified: 28 April 2026<\/p>\n\n
A petitioner walked into the Delhi High Court last winter with a question prosecutors had been ducking since the new criminal code came into force. He’d been granted interim bail on medical grounds. The state argued that the days he spent on interim bail should count against the fifteen-day window in which police custody could be sought under Section 187 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023<\/a>. If they were right, every accused who took interim bail had to think twice. If they were wrong, then a long-running practitioner suspicion would harden into law.<\/p>\n The bench took the point as one of strict statutory construction. Section 187(2) speaks of the accused’s “custody,” not of any period of restricted liberty. Interim bail, by definition, is liberty: conditional, yes, but liberty all the same. To equate interim-bail days with custody days would punish the accused for invoking a constitutional remedy. It would also mean that an accused on medical bail risked having the order revoked the moment he started feeling better. Neither outcome, the Court said, was tolerable under Article 21.<\/p>\n The reasoning leaned on a quiet textual point. The older Sanjay Dutt and Bhim Singh frameworks, decided under the old Section 167 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973<\/a> CrPC, had used the phrase “actual custody.” The BNSS drafters retained the same language. So when prosecutors invited the Court to read interim-bail days into custody, they were really asking it to override the statute’s own word. The bench refused.<\/p>\n Holding: the period an accused spends on interim bail is excluded from the Section 187(2) BNSS computation. A police-custody application made after interim-bail return must be tested against the original 15-day window, with interim-bail days subtracted. The ruling, Neeraj Kumar v. State (NCT of Delhi), 2026:DHC:1125<\/a>, reported by Verdictum, Bar and Bench, and LiveLaw in February 2026, is now the leading BNSS-era authority on the interaction between interim bail and police custody. For criminal practitioners, it closes a loophole prosecutors had been exploiting since BNSS came into force on 1 July 2024. For everyone watching the BNSS jurisprudence settle, it’s a sharp reminder: each section will be interpreted on its own statutory text, not assumed to mirror its CrPC predecessor.<\/p>\n\n That Delhi High Court ruling is one piece of a much larger puzzle. Default bail under BNSS Section 187<\/strong> is the right every accused holds the moment the prosecution misses its chargesheet deadline, a right the Supreme Court has repeatedly described as “indefeasible.” But practitioners still ask the same questions. Is the timeline 60 days or 90? When does the clock start? What if the magistrate just writes “seen” on a custody-extension order? Does the right survive judicial custody, weekends, or a state amendment that purported to grant 120 days?<\/p>\n Here’s everything you need to know about default bail under BNSS Section 187 in 2026.<\/p>\n Default bail under BNSS Section 187 is the right of an accused to be released if the police fail to file the chargesheet within 60 days (for offences punishable up to 10 years) or 90 days (for offences punishable with death, life imprisonment, or a minimum of 10 years). The right is indefeasible under Article 21.<\/p>\n The pages that follow walk through what the section says, when the right accrues, how to count the days, what the new BNSS-era rulings are doing to old assumptions, and how to draft an application that gets your client home.<\/p>\n
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