Pune: On Thursday, the Supreme Court upheld the interim bail that Shivani Agarwal, who had been detained for more than ten months for allegedly tampering with her 17-year-old son’s blood samples in the Pune Porsche hit-and-run case, had been given on April 22.
Chief Justice of India (CJI) B.R. Gavai and Justice Augustine George Masih’s bench ruled that the requirement to provide written grounds for arrest applies to all offenses under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), not just those covered by specific laws like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) or the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).
The court emphasized that both the arrest and the following remand are unconstitutional if written grounds of arrest are not provided in a language that the arrestee can understand. Article 22(1) of the Constitution mandates that the arrested individual be informed of the reasons for their arrest; this is a constitutional guarantee, not just a formality. The bench noted that a person’s fundamental rights under Article 21 are violated if they are not told of the reasons for their arrest as quickly as possible, making the arrest unlawful.
The prosecution may request remand or custody by submitting an application to the relevant trial court, the court stated while affirming the bail. In doing so, the Supreme Court ruled that the grounds of arrest must be given to the accused in writing, either before the magistrate or the trial court, as applicable, and that the reasons and necessity for the same must be explained.
The decision was made during the hearing of a number of criminal appeals in which the accused argued that they were not given written notice of the reasons for their arrest, in violation of both Section 50 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 (now Section 47 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023) and Article 22(1) of the Constitution. The court made it clear that the prosecution could only request custody or remand after providing the accused with written justification for the arrest before the magistrate.
Agarwal’s bail is related to the May 19, 2024, incident in Pune where her young son allegedly drove over and murdered two IT professionals, Ashwini Koshta and Aneesh Awadhiya, while operating his father’s Porsche. For allegedly tampering with his blood tests, she was taken into custody.
Agarwal was represented by senior attorney Vikram Chaudhari, Dhvani Shah, Rishi Sehgal, Nikhil Jain, and AOR Muskaan Khurana.
