Random charges of tyranny

Solution 1:

Maybe I opened the popup and by the time I clicked "Imprison" they had their plot auto-stopped.

That's precisely what happened. It is not impossible, it has happened to me many times.

As evident from your statement, you have auto-stop plots option enabled. So what happens is:

  1. A vassal plots something.
  2. You get a popup to imprison them.
  3. Meanwhile, a message is on its way to the vassal to end their plot.
  4. The time it takes for a landed noble to respond to a missive depends on the distance it is from your capital.
  5. By the time you clicked imprison, the vassal had already ended their plot. Which therefore gave you a tyranny penalty as you imprisoned them without a cause.

An important thing to note is, whenever the plot is autostopped and you have imprison dialogue open, it immediately shows that you will get -40 penalty. I reckon you did not notice that and imprisoned the guy anyways.

There is no console command available in this regard except the remotely related neg_opinion command. You can view list of all console commands here.