[stingraycharles]

I would like to go a little off-topic and explain a common misconception about the medieval times: it was usually "confess and you will get a light punishment, or otherwise we will do something really bad to you, and if you're innocent the lord will save you". This is actually a fairly interesting game theory: people that truely believed they were innocent, believed the lord would save them.

As such, it was usually only the innocent people that went through the trial-by-god process, and very often the priest conducting the trial rigged the process, and very few people were actually killed in the process.