"For the purposes of this section proceedings shall be deemed to be commenced on the date on which the warrant to apprehend or to cite the accused is granted if the warrant is executed without undue delay."

The argument put before the court in this case was that on the undisputed facts a warrant had never been executed at all, irrespective of any question of undue delay, because the complainer had surrendered himself voluntarily to the court at the invitation of the procurator fiscal in response to the existence of the warrant, but not in relation to an execution of it.

"The first question for consideration is whether what happened in this case can possibly be said to amount to 'execution' of the warrant to apprehend. The answer to that question is, emphatically, no. There cannot, in law, be 'execution' of such a warrant until what is authorised is carried out in accordance with its terms. The next question - and the real question in the case - is whether a prosecutor who has obtained, timeously, a warrant to apprehend, and who seeks to rely upon section 331(3) must, in order to do so, proceed to the physical arrest of the accused in all circumstances, and even where it is quite unnecessary to do so. We do not consider that it is permissible to presume that Parliament had any such intention. Section 331 of the Act of 1975 repeats and re-enacts the provisions of section 23 of the Summary Jurisdiction Act of 1954 which, in turn, echo the terms of section 26 of the corresponding Act of 1908. Section 331(3) provides that, for the purposes of the section, 'proceedings shall be deemed to be commenced on the date on which a warrant to apprehend ... is granted, if such warrant is executed without undue delay'. It does not provide that it is an essential prerequisite of the competency of such proceedings that the warrant to apprehend therein mentioned be enforced according to its terms in all circumstances, including the circumstance that enforcement, without undue delay, is rendered quite unnecessary by the voluntary action of the accused concerned. Execution of such a warrant without undue delay on the prosecutor's part may be forestalled by an accused's voluntary surrender of his person to the court when, for example, he has learned of its issue before effective action upon it has been possible. Is it to be supposed that Parliament contemplated that such an act by an accused should have the result of denying to the prosecutor any right to rely on section 331(3)? We think not. Such a situation is not covered by the language of the subsection. We are certainly not prepared to accept that an accused who learns of the existence of a warrant to arrest him on statutory charges, and who makes his arrest unnecessary by voluntarily submitting himself to the jurisdiction of the court before it has been enforced without undue delay should be able thereby to nullify subsequent proceedings merely by asserting that he had not been subjected to an unnecessary arrest. Nothing in the language of section 331(3) compels us to hold that unnecessary arrest on the faith of a competent and timeously obtained warrant to apprehend is a condition precedent to the prosecutor's right to rely upon it. The reference in the subsection to execution without undue delay must, we think, be understood to deal only with the situation in which a warrant to apprehend for the purposes of section 331(3) requires to be enforced and is enforced. It has no application whatever to the situation in which, there having been no undue delay on the prosecutor's part, the necessity for its execution is elided by the voluntary act of the accused concerned which achieves the entire objective of the warrant. That is the situation disclosed by the facts of this case and for the reason, and upon our construction of section 331(3), the appeal fails."