Carmelo D. Morabito
Carmelo D. Morabito’s exposure to the legal field started in 2005 when he joined a New York personal injury law firm while still in High School. He continued to grow with the firm and eventually began working as an associate upon being admitted to the New York State Bar. While in New York, he focused on civil litigation, including various personal injury matters related to motor vehicle collisions, product liability, and premises liability. He gained extensive experience conducting motion practice at both the trial and appellate levels.
Carmelo joined Smith, Gildea & Schmidt’s litigation department as an associate in January of 2018. His practice areas include medical malpractice and catastrophic personal injury, including wrongful death.
As a medical malpractice attorney, Carmelo has successfully represented clients injured as a result of doctors’ negligence. Medical malpractice can happen in many different ways, including a doctor’s failure to properly diagnose or treat medical conditions, a doctor’s failure to properly monitor a patient for a condition, a doctor’s failure to use proper tools during medical procedures, and a doctor’s improper prescription of medication.
In addition to practicing as a medical malpractice attorney, Carmelo is also a catastrophic personal injury attorney who has also successfully represented clients injured or killed due to negligence of others. He has represented families of individuals killed in wrongful death actions, slip and falls, and he has also successfully handled numerous car accident cases involving individuals severely injured due to the negligent and careless driving of others.
Carmelo brings years of personal injury experience to the firm.
St. John’s University, B.S. summa cum laude (2010)
St. John’s University School of Law, J.D. (2013)
New York Supreme Court Appellate Division – Second Department (2014)
Supreme Court of Maryland (formerly the Court of Appeals of Maryland) (2017)
Carmelo is a member of the Baltimore County Bar Association and the Maryland State Bar Association. He is a former Committee Chair of both the Continuing Legal Education Committee and the Entertainment Committee for the Baltimore County Bar Association.
As part of his leadership roles in the Baltimore County Bar Association, Carmelo has been praised by past presidents for his assistance in helping to organize and manage Continued Legal Education programs and charity fundraising events such as the Annual Golf Tournament and Silent Auction.
Carmelo has volunteered numerous hours of pro bono work towards assisting a group of volunteer firefighters, EMTs, and other first responders in Baltimore County with a legal dispute.
Medical Malpractice – Plaquenil Toxicity
Mr. Morabito has successfully represented clients who have lost their vision and become blind due to the effects of the prescription drug Plaquenil, also known as Hydroxychloroquine. Plaquenil has been used for decades to treat Lupus and Rheumatoid Arthritis. However, if Plaquenil is taken for too many years, or if the dosage prescribed is too high, it can cause vision loss and permanent blindness.
Doctors who prescribe Plaquenil have a responsibility to make sure that patients taking the drug are not taking it for too long of a period of time, that the dosage is not too high, and that the patient is receiving the proper testing. Blindness can be prevented when the proper medical precautions are taken. However, if medical malpractice occurs in this context, the results are often life-changing and irreversible.
Mr. Morabito has successfully recovered damages for clients whose doctors had committed medical malpractice by allowing them to go blind while being prescribed Plaquenil.
One client had been prescribed Plaquenil for 15 years. During this time, she was regularly seeing an eye doctor twice a year and believed that she was being taken care of. When the client realized that glasses could no longer help her vision – and that her vision continued to get worse – she realized something was wrong. With the help of experts, Mr. Morabito was able to show that the eye exams she was receiving twice a year were not suitable to detect changes in vision caused by Plaquenil, and that the doctor who prescribed Plaquenil was giving more than twice the proper dosage for his patient.
As a medical malpractice attorney, Mr. Morabito demonstrated that both the Rheumatologist who prescribed the Plaquenil and the ophthalmologist who was monitoring the client’s eyesight, were negligent and contributed to the woman’s blindness. Had either one of these doctors properly cared for the woman, she would not have lost her vision and her independence.
Catastrophic Personal Injury – Wrongful Death
As a catastrophic personal injury attorney, Mr. Morabito was successful in recovering compensation for the family of a woman who was killed when a dead tree fell on top of her vehicle as she was driving on a public roadway.
While driving to work one morning, a woman drove past a residential community. This community was maintained by a Homeowners Association who chose to keep trees between the roadway and the homes to provide privacy for its residents.
One of the trees next to the roadway had been dead for years and fell towards the roadway as the woman was driving by. The tree struck the woman’s vehicle, resulting in her death. Mr. Morabito was able to uncover evidence which showed that the Homeowners Association chose to maintain the trees within the community that posed a danger to its residents, but chose to ignore the trees next to public roadways which posed a danger to members of the public.
When a dead tree falls and impacts the ground or a roadway, it splinters and shatters, sending shrapnel in every direction. Within the industry, the “fall zone” of a tree is the area around a tree where people or objects could be injured if the tree were to fall. This is often considered to be 1.5 times the height of the tree.
With the help of expert witnesses, Mr. Morabito was able to determine the length of time that the tree had been dead, the height of the tree before it fell and shattered, and the fact that the entire roadway was within the tree’s “fall zone.”
The evidence strongly showed that had the Homeowners Association cared for the lives of the public as much as it cared for the lives of its own residents, the dead tree would have been identified and remedied years prior, preventing an unnecessary loss of life.