The publication being a matter of supreme importance, it was the duty of the inquisitors personally to draw it up, and not entrust it to subordinates, least of all to the fiscal, who was technically the prosecutor. Orders to this effect were issued in 1529; they were repeated in the Instructions of 1561 but, in 1568, the Suprema was obliged to take the Barcelona tribunal to task for allowing the fiscal to do it, and a later writer informs us that inquisitors continued to shirk the labor and threw it upon the secretaries.[149]
The labor was doubtless great, when the witnesses were numerous and loquacious, and the delicate duty was apt to be recklessly performed by subordinates, fearful of rebuke if they allowed too much to be known. The custom was to give the evidence of each witness separately, as deposed by "a certain person" and, when practicable, to divide it up into articles, each covering a separate charge or fact. In this process the elimination of all circumstances that might give a clue to the identity of the witnesses was easy, and there was little scruple in misleading the defendant or in omitting whatever might be thought to weaken the case. In the publication read to Marí Gómez la Sazeda, when on trial at Toledo in 1544, the evidence of one witness is divided and represented as given by two, with the object, as noted on the margin, of preventing her from identifying him.[150] In the case of Gaspar de Torralva, before the same tribunal in 1531, the publication bears such notes as "the evidence of the seventh witness omitted," "the evidence of the eighth witness omitted."[151] There was no possible supervision or control over this; the discretion of the inquisitors was absolute and the prisoner was at their mercy.
In many cases the publication was scarce more than a slovenly repetition of the fiscal's accusation and afforded to the accused no possible aid in his defence, as in that given to Juan de la Barra, tried for Lutheranism at Toledo, in 1656.[152] When it was drawn up more elaborately, it became confusing in the highest degree. One reads the long array of the assertions, or the conjectures, or the gossip retailed by twenty-five or thirty witnesses, vaguely set forth as what a "certain person" said or thought about another certain person, with no specifications of time or place, and one wonders how the prisoner could even grasp it sufficiently to form any definite conception of the character and weight of the evidence against him. And, with his life perhaps hanging in the balance, he was required to answer all this on the spot, article by article, and was closely cross-examined on his replies. That even an innocent man should compromise himself in the pitfalls thus cunningly laid for him was not unlikely, and yet this publication of evidence was represented as a special favor granted in view of the other restrictions imposed on the defence--a favor not always conceded in the secular courts.[153]