The court affirmed that both Magistrates and Sessions Courts possess the authority to grant default bail, even in the pendency of regular bail petitions.

JUDGMENT :

ANOOP CHITKARA, J.

1. The petitioner, incarcerated in the offence captioned above, had come up before this court seeking regular bail by filing the present petition on 09^th April 2025.

2. When the matter was taken up for the first time on the 9th of May 2025, the High Court Bar was abstaining, and the case was not taken up. After that, the matter was adjourned because the State had not filed the reply and subsequently adjourned to the present date, i.e., 05^th August 2025. Today, the State has also filed a custody certificate dated 04^th August 2025, which points out that the petitioner’s custody in this FIR is 5 months and 29 days, i.e., as on today, pre-trial custody is of six months.

3. However, the petitioner’s Counsel informed this Court that during the pendency of the petition, the petitioner’s custody in the trial court exceeded the statutory period and consequently, vide order dated 16-07-2025, the trial court had released the petitioner on bail granting benefits under Section 167 (2) CrPC, which corresponds to Section 187 (3) BNSS . The petitioner’s Counsel also handed over a downloaded copy of the order dated 16th July 2025, passed by Sub Divisional Judicial Magistrate, Ajnala, and submits that the present petition has rendered infructuous.

4. The proposition of law which needs a judicial answer is whether the Magistrate was competent to grant default bail, also known as compulsive bail or statutory bail, even when the regular bail petition was pending before the Sessions Court or the High Court, and similarly, the Sessions Judge, when the regular bail is pending before the High Court?

5. To answer the above proposition, it would be relevant to extract section 187 of BNSS , 2023 which is parallel to Section 167 of CrPC, 1973 reads as follows:

S. 187. (1) Whenever any person is arrested and detained in custody, and it appears that the investigation cannot be completed within the period of twenty-four hours fixed by section 58, and there are grounds for believing that the accusation or information is well-founded, the officer in charge of the police station or the police officer making the investigation, if he is not below the rank of sub-inspector, shall forthwith transmit to the nearest Magistrate a copy of the entries in the diary hereinafter specified relating to the case, and shall at the same time forward the accused to such Magistrate.

(2) The Magistrate to whom an accused person is forwarded under this section may, irrespective of whether he has or has no jurisdiction to try the case, after taking into consideration whether such person has not been released on bail or his bail has been cancelled, authorise, from time to time, the detention of the accused in such custody as such Magistrate thinks fit, for a term not exceeding fifteen days in the whole, or in parts, at any time during the initial forty days or sixty days out of detention period of sixty days or ninety days, as the case may be, as provided in sub-section (3), and if he has no jurisdiction to try the case or commit it for trial, and considers further detention unnecessary, he may order the accused to be forwarded to a Magistrate having such jurisdiction.

(3) The Magistrate may authorise the d