From what day does a prison term actually start counting if the accused was already detained?

The rule when the offender is already in custody

Article 28 answers this in one sentence: if the offender shall be in prison the term of the duration of the temporary penalties shall be computed from the day on which the judgment of conviction shall have become final. The trigger is finality of the judgment, not the date it was promulgated and not the date detention began. So a judgment that is still open to challenge has not yet started the clock under this rule, and the operative date is the one on which the decision ceased to be assailable — a date the record of the case will show.

The rule when the offender is at liberty

For someone not in prison, the article uses a different event. Where the penalty is one consisting of deprivation of liberty, its duration is computed from the day that the offender is placed at the disposal of the judicial authorities for the enforcement of the penalty. That is a physical fact rather than a paper one. A person at liberty when the judgment becomes final does not begin serving in absentia; the count starts when he is actually turned over for enforcement, which is why the two situations produce different dates on the same case.

A third rule for everything else

The article closes with a catch-all: the duration of the other penalties shall be computed only from the day on which the defendant commences to serve his sentence. That covers penalties which are neither temporary in the sense used in the first sentence nor a deprivation of liberty. The point of having three rules is that the Code will not treat time as running against a penalty that is not yet being borne. Note also what this article does not address — whether time already spent in detention is credited is governed elsewhere, not here.

Which date to pull from the record

In practice the disagreement is almost always about one of two documents. The first is whatever shows when the judgment became final, since that is the trigger in the commonest situation. The second is the commitment paper showing when the person was actually delivered for service of sentence. Get both, with their dates, before arguing about a release date. Where the two point to different days, the article decides which one counts by asking a single question: was the offender in prison at the time or not.

Related provisions

• Revised Penal Code, Article 28 — Computation Of Penalties
• Revised Penal Code, Article 27 — Duration Of Penalties