The image I have of trials where people were judged on being witches or not is mainly shaped by mainstream media. In many TV shows and films these trials are often like:" either she drowns, when we put heavy stones on her and throw her in the lake or she survives and she is a witch". Either outcome meant death.
That is what I am wondering. Once you were on trial, were you basically already sentenced to death?
Are you interested in witch trials in the Middle Ages specifically or are you interested in deaths after/during interrogatory practices/tests during witch trials in general? I only ask, because most witch trials took place during the Rennaissance/early modern period (and the ordeal of cold water, you mention, is also mainly associated with witch trials during that time).
I assume, you are interested in the conundrum that, from a modern standpoint, witch trials seem to have had no possibility for a positve outcome for the defendant. Is that correct? In this case the answer is very quick: This assumption is due to the common "knowledge" of tests such as "if she sinks, she is innocent, if she doesn't, she is guilty, let's burn her" (Interesting side note: During the middle ages, the ordeal of cold water was just the other way around: If you floated, you were considered innocent). But that's not true. In most cases, the person immersed into the water was tied to a rope, so (s)he (many defendants in witch trials were male!) could be pulled out immediately.
Sources: Polish witches. [Notice the vodka part! A very nice touch!]
Most witch trials found place outside of the middle ages during the early modern period from about 1500 to 1700, with a peak around the wars of religion. In fact the belief that witches were even a thing amongst clergy weren't common until the end of the 1300s. I am personally most familiar with the witch trials in Northern Norway in the 1600s and early 1700s, and most of this post will concern these, but should also hold true in the large picture for the rest of Europe. Most of the peaks in numbers of witch trials found place around disasters, such as wars or famines, but also during small disasters such as ship wrecks (a common belief was that witches could turn themselves into whales and sink ships). Being suspected was normally not enough, and you would get your day in court to prove your innocence or to have your guilt proven.
The accused in witch trials were typically not the average citizen, but rather outsiders. People with different religious outlooks, different ethnicity, antisocial tendencies, new arrivals in the community, people who lived alone or those people just considered weird. Upstanding citizens who were accused would more often than not be released thanks to character testimony from a spouse or friend in good standing and be released. This meant that a lot of the people who were accused of being a witch was already disliked by the rest of the community and therefore already had a strike against them.
What you were accused off and when you were accused had a lot of impact on your chance of being convicted. For instance if you were accused of using witchcraft against a local lord or magistrate your chance of acquittal was not very good. Similarly if there had been some sort of catastrophe and blood lust in the community was high you also had a relatively low chance of acquittal. If someone who had already appeared before a trial had named you, often under torture, your chance of being found guilty was also quite high. If you were accused of witchcraft without co-conspirators outside of a time of great upheaval, your chances of being acquitted was fairly good, to basically certain depending on time and place.
Who held your trial was also quite important. Local courts were typically not staffed by professional lawyers, but rather by important members of the community, such as priests and other powerful local persons. It was common advice in Northern Norway to try to delay your case until someone from the capital came along to judge cases, as they were typically professional, better educated and more liberal.
In other words whether you were found guilty or not depended on your societal status, age, religion, what you were accusation were, the timing, and who you were tried by.
We must not generalize here. The outcome of a witch trial depended on a great number of things, so there's just a few tendencies we might state:
Religious conflict with neighboring territories and/or religious zealotry (NOT the confession itself!) could fuel the desire to actually execute the defendants. Hence the high trial:execution ratio in the bishoprics Bamberg and Würzburg during the counter-reformation (as they were small Catholic territories surrounded by Protestant territories) vs the very few executions in Ireland with its consolidated unrivaled Catholicism. As to the number of trials in the latter, the literature I used unfortunately does not give any numbers.
Power and personal stance of the head of state could influence the development and outcome of trials: In Mecklenburg, 50% of the 4000 defendants were executed whereas in the Electoral Palatinate, the elector prohibited such trials in the first place.
To put it in a nutshell, Early Modern (because this is actually the time of widespread trials, not the Middle Ages) witch trials certainly did not always end with the execution of the defendant even though there were times and regions where you were very likely to end up on the stake. I am afraid I just cannot give you absolute numbers on that as it is rarely stated how many trials there were in the first place.
Sources:
• Behringer, Wolfgang: Hexen und Hexenprozesse in Deutschland, Munich 2010.#
• Schwerhoff, Gerd: Strafjustiz und Gerechtigkeit in historischer Perspektive - das Beispiel der Hexenprozesse, in: Justiz und Gerechtigkeit. Historische Beiträge (16.-19. Jahrhundert), ed. Andrea Griesebner/ Martin Scheutz/ Herwig Weigl, Innsbruck 2002, pp. 33-40.
• Voltmer, Rita/Irsigler, Franz: Die europäischen Hexenverfolgungen der Frühen Neuzeit - Vorurteile, Faktoren und Bilanzen, in: Hexenwahn. Ängste der Neuzeit (ed. Rosmarie Beier De-Haan/Rita Voltmer/Franz Irsigler), Berlin 2002, pp. 30-45.
I come from North Berwick in Scotland, which was the site of one of the biggest witch trials in Scottish history, so we it was a very common subject at school. They loved the dramatic stories of "ducking" and burning at the stake but in reality it didn't work like that.
Ducking witches was more common elsewhere from what I have read but in Scotland the only recorded usage of it was in 1597 at St Andrews. In the case of the leaders of the North Berwick "coven" a confession was extracted through torture before they were executed.
In this case the time between accusing and executing was short because the plot was to murder the king but in other cases it was not uncommon for investigations to take years before formal charges were laid. Also in many cases suspects were acquitted.
Am I misinformed or is this question mixing up two different witch tests.
I though stacking stones on people (which is apparently called "peine forte et dure") was a separate thing from the more common practice of dunking (throwing people in the water to see if they drowned). Is this question just mixing the two up, or were there stones involved in dunking?