Even after she received a £12,500 personal injury compensation award for an accident in which she received serious injuries to her head, one Lancashire woman has requested that her car accident claim case be re-opened.
According to accident solicitor experts writing for the Wigan Today newspaper, Joanne Dunhill, fifty years of age, had been run over by a motorcycle while she was trying to cross the A635 Doncaster Road. Ms Dunhill sustained severe head injuries in the accident, which resulted in a £12,500 compensation award from the motorcycle rider’s insurance company.
However, Ms Dunhill may not have had the requisite amount of legal capacity to make informed decisions when she initially accepted the settlement offer in 2003 due to extent of the injuries she suffered to her head, members of her legal team are now suggesting. The case has been taken to the Court of Appeal, with the injured woman’s legal representatives making the argument that the £12,500 sum that had been awarded to her was woefully inadequate.
Calling her initial award merely ‘chicken feed,’ her legal team claims that, due to the extent of her head injuries, the damages Ms Dunhill was entitled to were much higher, claiming that a proper award should have been approximately £2.2 million.
At the time of the initial payout, Ms Dunhill remarked that she felt as if she had no choice but to accept the offer, as suggestions were made to her that she could take the £12,500 or leave with nothing. As a measure of the importance of the injured woman’s case, judgement on whether she has the right to appeal the initial settlement has been deferred to a forthcoming date.