The subtlety of the casuists had full play when they came to discuss the torture of the prisoner who absolutely refused to confess. According to law, the torture could be inflicted but once, but this regulation was easily evaded. For it was lawful to subject the prisoner to all the various kinds of torture in succession; and if additional evidence were discovered, the torture could be repeated. When they desired, therefore, to repeat the torture, even after an interval of some days, they evaded the law by calling it technically not a "repetition" but a "continuance of the first torture:" _Ad continuandum tormenta, non ad iterandum_, as Eymeric styles it.[1] This quibbling of course gave full scope to the cruelty and the indiscreet zeal of the Inquisitors.
[1] Eymeric, _Directorium_, 3a pars, p. 481, col. 2.
But a new difficulty soon arose. Confessions extorted under torture, had, as we have seen, no legal value. Eymeric himself admitted that the results obtained in this way were very unreliable, and that the Inquisitors should realise this fact.
If, on leaving the torture chamber, the prisoner reiterated his confession, the case was at once decided. But suppose, on the contrary, that the confession extorted under torture was afterwards retracted, what was to be done? The Inquisitors did not agree upon this point. Some of them, like Eymeric, held that in this case the prisoner was entitled to his freedom. Others, like the author of the _Sacro Arsenale_, held that "the torture should be repeated, in order that the prisoner might be forced to reiterate his first confession which had evidently compromised him." This seems to have been the traditional practice of the Italian tribunals.
But the casuists did not stop here. They discovered "that Clement V had only spoken of torture in general, and had not specifically alluded to witnesses, whence they concluded that one of the most shocking abuses of the system, the torture of witnesses, was left to the sole discretion of the Inquisitor, and this became the accepted rule. It only required an additional step to show that after the accused had been convicted by evidence or had confessed as to himself, he became a witness as to the guilt of his friends, and thus could be arbitrarily (?) tortured to betray them."[1]