I don't know that because it's obviously false. If someone was jailed in relation to such a case then it was because they did something way beyond violating the HOA CC&Rs, such as assaulting an HOA employee or refusing to comply with a court order. HOAs have no police powers and private criminal prosecutions haven't been allowed in any US state for many years.
Google is your friend. Sorry to be so trite, but there are literally dozens upon dozens of sources.
One such example happened in 2008. The man's name is "Joseph Prudente", and he was jailed because he could not pay the HOA fine for a brown lawn. Yes, there was a judge hitting Joseph Prudente with a "contempt of court" to land him in jail (with an end date of "the lawn is fixed or the fine is paid"), but his only "crime" was ever being too poor to maintain his lawn to the HOA's standards.
> “It’s a sad situation,” says [HOA] board president Bob Ryan. “But in the end, I have to say he brought it upon himself.”
It's not my job to do your legal research for you and you're misrepresenting the facts of the case.
As I expected, Mr. Prudente wasn't jailed for violating a HOA rule but rather for refusing to comply with a regular court order. It's a tragic situation and I sympathize with the defendant but when someone buys property in an HOA they agree to comply with the CC&R. If they subsequently lack the financial means to comply then they have the option of selling the property, or of filing bankruptcy which would at least delay most collections activities. HOAs are not charities, and poverty is not a legally valid reason for failing to meet contractual obligations.
So, having a bad lawn is ultimately worse than being convicted of a crime, maybe even of killing someone, since there's no sentence. There's no appeal. There's no concept of "doing your time". Your lawn goes brown, and you can be put in jail forever because they got a court order which makes it all perfectly legal.
> It's not my job to do your legal research for you and you're misrepresenting the facts of the case.
So, since it's not your job, you're happy to be ignorant of what can be found with a simple Google search? It's not looking up legal precedent or finding a section in the reams of law - it's a well reported and repeated story.
And let's be honest with each other - while by the letter of the law he was put into jail for failing to fulfill a court order, in practice he was put into jail for having a bad lawn. I'll go so far to assert that the bits in between don't really matter, since the failure to maintain the lawn lead directly to being in jail until the lawn was fixed.
So no, we don't have a de jure debtor's prison. But we do have a de facto debtor's prison.
Let's be honest with each other: you're attempting to distort and misrepresent what happened in one Florida case to try and support your narrative about what happened in a different and entirely unrelated federal case. The case of Anderson v. TikTok under discussion here doesn't involve a contempt of court order, no one has gone to jail, nor has the trial court even reached a decision on damages.
The reality is that this case is going to spend years working through the normal appeals process. Before anyone panics or celebrates let's be patient and wait for that to run its course. Until that happens it's all speculation. Calm down.
The US legal system gives authority to judges to use contempt orders to jail people when necessary as a last resort. This is essential to make the system work because otherwise some people would just ignore orders with no consequence. Whether the underlying case is about a debt owed to an HOA or any other issue is irrelevant. And the party subject to a contempt order can always take that up with a higher court.
Did you know that there's has been a homeowner jailed for breaking his HOA's rules about lawn maintenance?
The chances are good that someone will go to jail.