Just wondering if any poor unfortunate accused by the Church had any chance at all to prove their innocence and escape with their life and function of their limbs, or if the game was rigged against them from the start.
It was possible to escape the Spanish Inquisition with life and limbs intact -- if you really wanted to stack the deck in your favor as much as possible, preemptively making a voluntary confession to your local branch of the inquisition was ideal. This had consequences that were far from easy -- for instance, confess to sodomy and you could expect to be dealt a significant penance, face social penalties, and be expected to inform on any other sodomitical sexual partners you'd ever had, who would receive even stiffer penalties in accordance with their rank. If you were an aristocrat, you might be exiled; your lower-ranking sexual partners might be beaten, imprisoned, or condemned to the galleys for a time determined by the inquisition. Some individuals still judged these consequences to be easier and more negotiable than the penalties for being found guilty any other way, even as easier and more negotiable than the penalties for other unrelated crimes in civil court. But suppose you're not ready to plead guilty -- perhaps you're innocent, perhaps you don't believe you've done anything wrong. You might be found innocent; even if you aren't found innocent, depending on how you behave yourself during the process of examination and interrogation and the severity of the charges you're being investigated for, you might be found guilty and still get out of there with your life intact. Nasty penances might still be in the offing, but there were lots of possible outcomes besides death.
In general you didn't need to be worried about being tried for witchcraft by the Spanish inquisition as people think of it, the post-Reformation Early Modern institution -- earlier inquisitions in Germany and France focused on the threat of witchcraft but by the time of the Spanish inquisition's heyday, witchcraft was a crime for the secular courts to deal with and the ideological strain powering the Spanish inquisition often held that witchcraft as an efficacious power didn't actually exist. There were punishments for superstition (such as, say, thinking witchcraft was real and could hurt you, or thinking you could use witchcraft to help your neighbors) that classified it as a minor heresy, but superstition and witchcraft were a mere sideshow. The inquisition was concerned with major heresy -- which could be anything from leading a double life as an outward convert but a secret Jew, to subscribing to an strain of Catholic thought viewed as dangerously unorthodox like Erasmians and Illuminists.(Sodomy, bigamy, solicitation, etc. were within the Spanish inquisition's scope because they were also classified as minor heresies.)
The Spanish inquisition itself was initially established to deal with the first instance there, the problem of Spanish conversos and "Old Christian" anxieties about "New Christian" loyalty to Christianity. Antisemitism was the name of the game in Early Modern Spain, not Malleus Maleficarum-style witchcraft craze, and clues to the identity of 'secret Judaizers' might be refusal to eat pork, continuing use and knowledge of Hebrew, keeping up with rituals of cleanliness, and so on. (Something similar was in place for moriscos, relatively-recent converts to Christianity from Islam who were often suspected of keeping up ritual ablutions behind closed doors.) Later concerns with "Protestant" heresies came with the Reformation -- this is where Erasmians and Illuminists come in. Maybe you publicly professed that fornication was not a sin; maybe you publicly professed that it was better to give alms to the poor than to found chaplaincies; maybe you owned a book by Luther or said something that suggested you thought clerical celibacy was scripturally unsound; maybe the religious order you founded had a touch of suspicious mysticism in its founding documents and permitted conversos to join it -- all these things could prompt investigation for heresy, which might proceed as far as actual punishment and might stop short of it. All of them would get you in hot water (and perhaps garner some accusations of secret Judaizing too, for good measure) even if you were an Old Christian to the nth generation.
But when people think of the Inquisition at its height they're probably thinking of public burnings and guys like Torquemada. A contemporary account of the early (c. 1480) Inquisition in Seville outlined procedures, as well as penalties short of death that relied on public stigma:
And he gave principal charge of this Inquisition to a friar of upright life who had great zeal in the Faith, who was called Fray Tomas de Torquemada, confessor to the king and prior of the monastery of Santa Cruz of Segovia of the Order of St Dominic. This prior, who was the chief inquisitor, put other inquisitors in his place in all the other cities and towns of the kingdom of Castile, and Aragon, and Valencia, and Catalonia. These made inquisitions on the matter of heretical iniquity in every land and district where they were assigned; and in these places they set their charters and edicts, founded upon law, so that those who had engaged in Jewish practices or who were not in accord with the Faith, within a certain time might come to confess their faults and be reconciled with Holy Mother Church. And by these charters and edicts many persons of lineage, within the term that had been set, appeared before the inquisitors and confessed their faults and the errors that they had committed in this crime of heresy. And these were given penances according to the degree of the crime that each one had incurred. These were more than fifteen thousand persons, men as well as women. And if some were guilty of that crime and did not come to be reconciled within the period of time that had been decreed, once there was information from witnesses of the error they had committed, then they were taken prisoner and trial was instituted against them, by means of which they were condemned as heretics and apostates and turned over to secular justice.
Up to two thousand men and women were burned on various occasions in different cities and towns; and others were condemned to perpetual imprisonment; and to others was given as a penance that for all the days of their lives they should go marked with great red crosses placed on their clothing, both on the breast and on the back. And they as well as their children were declared unfit for all public office or responsibility, and it was decreed that they could not carry or wear silk or gold or camlet, on pain of death. Some relatives of the prisoners and the condemned protested, saying that the inquisition and procedure was rigorous beyond what it ought to be and that in the manner in which the trials were conducted and in the execution of the sentences the ministers and executors showed that they had hatred for those people. The king and the queen turned over this matter to certain prelates, men of conscience, who were to look into it and justly remedy the matter.
These public burnings, as well as public administering of other punishments, became known as the auto-da-fe. But especially as the inquisitions continued into the 16th century, the number of actual executions by burning decreased, and the auto-da-fe became an occasion primarily for public show and public display. Short of death, there were an abundance of other punishments -- perpetual imprisonment, penance, being marked with humiliating garments for a certain period of time or indefinitely, the loss of civic and professional privileges, the imposition of sumptuary restrictions, etc. Clerics might be forbidden from practicing Mass. All these things were public, some of them enforced on the scene of the auto-da-fe (like the donning of humiliating garments in front of everyone you knew) and others not, and all these things ranged from difficult-but-workable, to difficult-but-better-than-being-publicly-burned-to-death, to extremely difficult for those sentenced to them. None of them were great, but they were not intended to be lethal. In addition to the secondary punishments besides death you can see the creepy presence of the idea of being "relaxed", that is, loosed -- being handed over to secular justice to receive the death penalty. This is a fairly level account of the Seville inquisition's actions at their earliest and worst, not overhyping how easy or how impossible it was to escape punishment, but you can see here the system of outs built into the procedures, occasions to halt the process by pleading guilty -- the goal was not to kill heretics, the goal was to get heretics to confess their crimes and reconcile themselves to the Holy Mother Church and her practices. (Nevertheless, plenty of heretics did die, through execution, torture, or just of standard-issue "being in an Early Modern prison" causes. Which I'd hesitate to go so far as to call "natural causes".) But there's lots of reasons why a person might not want to do that, and many people did not.
Linking to previous discussions is not intended to discourage followon questions or debate. It's just a way to provide a faster answer.
There was a recent discussion, "was the inquisition as cruel as everyone thinks" at https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7wzb77/was_the_inquisition_as_cruel_as_everyone_thinks/ . /u/cdesmoulins provided replies. The top-level one addresses the general reputation of the Spanish Inquisition. A later one at https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7wzb77/was_the_inquisition_as_cruel_as_everyone_thinks/du5bihy/ quantifies the matter.
These are very good replies, and there's a lot of nuance, like "For what it's worth I also think attempts to counteract the Black Legend by focusing solely on death toll underestimate the other societal effects of a public inquisition and public spectacles of religious correction, but it's harder to quantify that.". So do read them; my jaw dropped when I read them.