On Friday, a jury acquitted the suspended Labour councillor Ricky Jones of encouraging violent disorder. He had made a throat-slitting gesture and used inflammatory language to a crowd when discussing those demonstrating after the Southport murders. Naturally, there was outrage that he had gone free, when others who have made similar remarks have faced prison. The most notable example of this is Lucy Connolly, the Tory councillor’s wife who last year pleaded guilty to inciting racial hatred after posting online: “set fire to all the hotels full of [asylum seekers] for all I care.” She received a 31-month sentence.

Some online lawyers have tried to claim that the two cases aren’t comparable, because Jones was acquitted by a jury and Connolly admitted guilt. Yet this fails to account for the pressure in the English legal system to plead guilty, thanks to the threat of extended time on remand and the cost of trial. Connolly could easily have been charged with a lesser offence, whereas Jones gambled on a jury clearing him of the less serious charge. The statutory mix of the elements within the charge of encouraging disorder is broad enough that a reasonable jury could interpret the Labour councillor’s actions either way. The same might have been true for Connolly, had she risked trial.

The problem is that Jones was charged at all. His speech deserves condemnation, and is hardly glowing evidence of his fitness for public office. The real problem, however, is the mess of English criminal law, particularly the “encouraging” offences introduced in 2007. The law should not be so vague that the police and Crown Prosecution Service have discretion to dispense charges in scenarios where the proper legal outcome is about as ascertainable as a coin flip.

The elements of any criminal offence ought to be certain as a general rule, and where the law must restrict speech for an overwhelming public good — such as in the immediate prevention of public disorder — maximum clarity is required. Instead, outcomes in these cases often depend on whether the defendant gives into plea pressure or challenges the interpretation of the offence in a higher court. That last avenue is made more difficult, even where the challenge has a good chance, by the English system’s longstanding hostility to criminal appeals of any sort.

Meanwhile, defendants like Connolly, who are pressured to plead, lose out completely and are instead left gambling on how the court will sentence them. At least in American plea bargaining, the defendant knows exactly what their sentence will be when they plead.

This is no basis for a free society. Remarks such as those made by Jones and Connolly, which were unlikely to produce violent disorder or racial hatred, do not require criminal law to suppress them. Instead, the present system, which applies broad statutes with broad discretion, takes resources away from actually stopping the rare dangerous speech that poses immediate threat to the King’s peace, and leaves heated public debate at risk of arbitrary charges.

It is time for Parliament to do its legislative job — rather than outsourcing it to commissions and reports — and clean up the criminal statute book. It should remove police and Crown discretion by narrowing and clarifying those speech offences which are actually necessary in a democratic society — those relating to immediate incitement of riot or similar disorder — and abolish those which have no place at all in one, such as the “grossly offensive communications” offence.

In the meantime, those of us who are fond of liberty should not be misled by outrage into calling for Jones to be jailed for as long as Connolly. The solution to jailing people wrongly for vague speech offences is not to jail more people for the same. The solution, rather, is to push for freedom under the law.