The jail sat on the court order releasing me — is there a crime for that?

Three separate ways the offence can be committed

Article 126 reaches any public officer or employee who delays for the period of time specified therein the performance of any judicial or executive order for the release of a prisoner or detention prisoner, or unduly delays the service of the notice of such order to said prisoner or the proceedings upon any petition for the liberation of such person. Three limbs, then: sitting on the order itself; sitting on the notice that would tell the prisoner about it; and sitting on the proceedings by which liberty is being sought. Each is complete on its own.

It is a public officer's offence

The article names any public officer or employee, and that is a real limitation on its scope. It is aimed at the person whose duty it was to act on the order, not at anyone whose conduct happened to slow things down. It is also not confined to the head of an institution: an employee who was responsible for a step in the process is within the words. Identifying who actually held the order, and when it reached them, is therefore the first thing to establish, because the provision is keyed to a duty resting on a particular person.

Not every delay, and not delay measured by feeling

The first limb is qualified by the phrase for the period of time specified therein, which refers to periods fixed elsewhere in the Code rather than to the reader's sense of how long is too long. The other two limbs use the word unduly, which likewise sets a standard rather than a stopwatch. A release that takes some hours to process is not automatically within this article. What the provision is directed at is delay that goes past the point the law is prepared to tolerate, which is a matter to be established rather than assumed.

What to preserve while it is still recoverable

Timing is the whole case, and the records that fix it disappear from memory quickly. Get a copy of the order with its date, and note when and to whom it was transmitted. Note the date and hour of actual release, the names of the officers you dealt with, and anything in the institution's own logbooks recording receipt. If a petition for liberation was pending, keep the record of every setting. A lawyer assessing this will be reconstructing a timeline, and the documents dated closest to the events are worth more than any later account.

Related provisions

• Revised Penal Code, Article 126 — Delaying Release Of A Prisoner
• Revised Penal Code, Article 124 — Arbitrary Detention By Officers