The inquisitorial procedure minutely regulated the practices of the interrogation. For an accused to be submitted to the torture, he had to be being prosecuted for a very grave crime, and the tribunal had to already have serious presumptions of his guilt. The local bishop had to give his agreement, which protected the accused from the abusive zeal of an occasional disreputable inquisitor. The interrogation could not be repeated. The instructions also stipulated the presence of a representative of the bishop and a doctor during the torture session, the prohibition of putting in danger of death and of mutilating, and the obligation of the doctor to render medical care immediately afterwards. The sick, the aged and pregnant women were exempted from interrogation under torture. Furthermore, torture was rarely employed: in 1-2% of the processes according to Jean Dumont, in 7-11% according to Bartolomé Bennassar.
It is surprising to learn that the majority of those accused withstood the torture and were, in consequence, acquitted. If the objective of the torturers was, as one might think, to obtain admissions of guilt at any cost, one is forced to admit that they were going about it in the wrong way. One must ask himself if the questioning under threat of torture was not more of an ultimate means of defense offered to the accused, a kind of judicial test comparable to the “ordeal” of the Middle Ages. That is, in my opinion, an hypothesis which should be looked into.
The ordeal, or “judgment of God,” was a judicial test of common usage up to about the year 1000. The accused proved his statements before the tribunal by the trial by fire, or of water or of the sword. In the first case, he held in his hands a burning coal; if his wounds were healed within a certain period of time, the tribunal concluded that his testimony had been true. In the second case, the accused was tied up and thrown into a large barrel of water; if he floated, which is the normal tendency because of the air in the lungs, the tribunal concluded that he had lied, but if he sank, at the risk of his life, it was because he had been telling the truth. Lastly, the trial by the sword put in opposition two knights representing two contradictory testimonies; victory indicated where the truth was to be found. The Church had always fought against the “ordeal”, which was a superstitious procedure, inherited from the old Germanic pagan law.
The use of torture as a means of proof is shocking to the modern mentality, but it was already an advancement in relation to the “ordeal.” One must not forget that questioning under torture was, at that time, employed much more frequently in criminal proceedings. Additionally, the Grand Inquisitor, St. John Capistran, forbade the usage of torture in inquisitorial proceedings in the 15th century, more than 300 years before King Louis XVI did the same for the criminal tribunals of France (although the Spanish Inquisition had re-established the use of it in the interim).
However that may be, and in spite of the use of torture, the inquisitorial procedure marks an advancement in the history of law. On the one hand, it definitively discarded the ordeal as a means of proof, in replacing it by the principle of testimonial proof, which still governs modern law to this day. On the other hand, it established the principle of the State as prosecutor. Up to that time, it was the victim who had to prove culpability, even in a criminal proceeding, and this was often difficult when the victim was weak and the criminal was powerful. But with the Inquisition, the victim is no more than a simple witness, as in the criminal proceedings of today. It was the ecclesiastical authority which had the burden of proof.
The number of heretics burned by the Inquisition has been greatly exaggerated. Juan Antonio Llorente is the originator of these imaginary numbers, which too many studies still refer to on this subject.18 Llorente was an apostate priest who put himself in the service of the Napoleonic occupation of Spain. After having calumniated the Inquisition, he destroyed the archives which would have been able to contradict him. Several historians still put forth inflated numbers based on anticlerical imagination.19 However, numbers of this order have been rejected since 1900 by Ernest Schafer and Alfonso Junco. Henceforth honest historians are in agreement in saying that the number of victims of the Spanish Inquisition was much less than is generally believed.20 Jean Dumont speaks of about 400 executions during the 24 years of the reign of Isabella the Catholic. That’s few indeed in comparison to the 100,000 victims of the purge of “collaborators” in France from 1944-45, or the tens of millions killed by the Communists in Russia, China, and elsewhere.
Note also that those condemned to death were not always executed. Their sentences were sometimes commuted to time in prison, and they were then burned in effigy. Moreover, the condemned were not necessarily burned alive. If they showed a certain repentance, they were suffocated before being thrown on the pyre. Remember also that it was only the relapsed, that is to say those who fell back into heresy after having abjured it, who were condemned to death.
.
Basically, it’s as simple as this little quote from Big Lebowski “That’s, just, like, your opinion, man.” 
Sick, huh?