Every Sunday from now on we will be publishing articles by the Guyana Bar Association outlining for the benefit of citizens, the power of arrest, detention and search conferred by the law on the Police Force. The articles will also look at the ramifications, both administrative and legal, of excesses by the authorities.
The first of these columns follows below.
Part 1
Much ado has been directed at the amendment made to the Constitution in 2003 which made it permissible for the police to keep an arrested person in custody for seventy-two hours before taking him before a court. The repercussions of this amendment will be discussed in later columns.
What is important for the purposes of this introduction is to bear in mind that, before a person can be in custody, he must be arrested. If the arrest is
