Now, I'm no fan of racists. I'm prepared to stick my neck out and say that. Reel back in shock, fellow Observer readers! I'm taking the risk, I'm saying it right out: I just don't like 'em.

So, I can understand why people were pleased to see Liam Stacey, the student who posted a nasty Twitter comment about Fabrice Muamba and replied in racist language to those who criticised him, go to prison for it. I can see why newspaper columnists have spent the last week cheering the sentence and the lost appeal.

But if you cheered, let me ask you two questions. Do you know what he's actually gone to prison for? And do you know what he actually tweeted?

All the TV and newspaper reporters, columnists and opiners quoted his first tweet ("LOL f*** Muamba. He's dead. #Haha" – Stacey didn't use asterisks) and referred vaguely to "racist tweets" after that.

But what were they? Did the reporters know but choose delicately not to repeat them? Or did they not know? Do the columnists who applaud the sentence know? Or have they – as I suspect – just seen the bowdlerised media, like the rest of us, and are satisfied with the hazy summary?

What terrifies me is that people are nodding happily all over the country, pleased to see a clampdown on internet trolling at last, as if the exact content of the tweets doesn't matter. It matters enormously. If we're going to send someone to prison for saying something, we damn well ought to know what it is he said. Anyone who's pleased to see a person jailed for a piece of writing, without bothering to seek out the precise words that were deemed illegal, should be ashamed of themselves.

It was quite wrong for the media to report the story without those details. They could use asterisks, bleeps and disclaimers, of course. But it's inappropriate and dangerous for a free press in a free country to inform us that someone has been imprisoned for the words he used, without quoting them. What kind of democracy is this, if we don't demand to know what those words were?

And what about the crime? The Daily Mail and Telegraph said that Stacey was guilty of "racially aggravated harassment". The Guardian said the charge was "incitement to racial hatred", then altered its website to say he "pleaded guilty to the Racially Aggravated s4A Public Order Act 1986" (which is a hard phrase to understand grammatically, never mind legally – can you plead guilty to an Act?).

ITV, perhaps confused and wanting to cover all bases, said Stacey's crime was "racially aggravated harassment and disorder".

Well, which is it?

I've found the tweets, after quite some scrabbling in the bowels of the internet, and they weren't harassment. Having some faith in the law, but a greater faith in the OED, I know that "harassment" must involve pestering someone repeatedly or persistently. Stacey tweeted five or six people, but only once each.

Incitement? No. Disorder? Not in the context of the internet, but we'll come to that.

The tweets are certainly revolting. He used the c-word (nasty, but not a crime); he used the grossly racist n-word and w-word; I have no sympathy for the foul-mouthed oik. If I heard that something worse than prison had happened to him by accident (had he, for example, trod on an upturned plug, screwed his eyes shut in pain and thus stumbled into a puddle of hydrochloric acid, burning off a couple of small toes before fainting in shock and whamming his head on a pitchfork left there by a passing cartoon character) I couldn't be truly sorry.

But nothing happened by accident. The court system – there to discipline the most violent instincts both of offenders and the offended into something civilised and just – made a deliberate decision to incarcerate him. It wasn't a jury trial either; no 12 people symbolically represented the rest of Britain in deciding that Stacey's behaviour was something we consider illegal. It was just one district judge, citing "public outrage" – which isn't a reason to put someone away. There was public outrage when Janet Jackson's boob fell out at the Super Bowl and I don't see her in jail.

And it isn't illegal to be a stupid bastard. Maybe it should be – but that would be terribly impractical. Imagine if there were an uprising against the new law? All the stupid bastards on one side, the rest of us on the other. That's not a fight we can win. They'd be too stupid to understand the rules or too bastardy to follow them. We'd be halfway through saying: "OK, reach for your pistols on the count of…" and they'd already have jabbed us in both eyes with a pencil.

So, we have to allow people to be stupid bastards and hope the human race keeps evolving.

Let's assume the Guardian (being the most specific) is correct and Stacey was jailed under section 4A of the Public Order Act. Under this, "no offence is committed where the words or behaviour are used, or the writing, sign or other visible representation is displayed, by a person inside a dwelling and the person who is harrassed, alarmed or distressed is also inside that or another dwelling". This Lewis Carroll construction seems to suggest that at least one party needs to be outdoors; either it's useless in the world of Twitter and iPhones, or is phrased in a way that a person of reasonable intelligence can't understand.

Do you know if it's applicable in this case? If not, then please try not to be glad he's in prison. He's a splot of grime in a far bigger picture. The government – or its Cameronian-Tory part, at least – is trying to increase the number of court cases held in secret, as though the operation of the law were no business of ours.

When people cheer Liam Stacey's jailing without knowing exactly what he did, or even what he's officially guilty of, I fear that we are halfway there already.

www.victoriacoren.com