Inquisitorial pardons deliberately made future prosecutions harder to defend against.

Evidence

The point of such a “pardon” was that, in exchange for the expunging of past offenses (and Rom´an had confessed to having fasted Ramadan, etc.), the person concerned, although let off with little more than a caution, became much more vulnerable to prosecution in the future, should he be caught in the Inquisition’s net again. Once a person had received the “benefit” of a pardon, he could not then plead ignorance on future occasions. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 928

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘general pardon’ as a trap parallels the trade-law discussions of institutions that enroll people into systems with asymmetric information costs — a pardon here functions as reputation/credit that the recipient then cannot disclaim.
• SEED: An essay on how ‘second chances’ and amnesty programs in surveillance states are engineered to escalate future vulnerability — from the Spanish Inquisition to modern immigration ‘self-disclosure’ schemes.