Inquisition procedures were structured to impose financial ruin on suspects

Evidence

On the Muslim side, the Moriscos (we can in this context call them that) preferred to keep the Inquisition at as great a distance from their affairs as possible. Their motives were not only the obvious ideological and religious ones but financial ones as well. Many aspects of the Inquisition’s way of conducting its affairs inevitably reduced its prisoners and their families to poverty. The procedural ease with which it could order the sequestration of the property of those it detained, the absence of limits on the time a case might drag out, the financial penalties that it could impose (and, one might add, the total absence of any provision for the award of compensation for wrongful arrest or for appeal), meant that the Inquisition was able to inflict, besides physical and spiritual torment, eventual financial ruin as well. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 512

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the law-and-economics literature on extralegal dispute resolution — the Inquisition as an institution whose cost structure systematically expropriates defendants; mirrors the diamond bourse arbitration reading.
• DEEPTHINKING: The sequestration-without-compensation, unlimited case duration, and no-appeal structure is a chillingly complete design for asset confiscation — worth sitting with as a model of how procedural law can function as wealth extraction.