Why the lay intuition is wrong here
The intuitive reading — “if she wrote that she did it, she probably did it” — rests on an unspoken assumption: that writing “I did this” is a specific behaviour that only guilty people display. That assumption is not supported by clinical-psychology evidence. Self-blaming writing is a well-studied phenomenon that occurs routinely in people facing sustained blame they cannot disprove, in people processing unresolvable loss, and in people under the kind of institutional pressure that clinical-staff accused of patient harm experience.
What the psychology literature consistently finds is that self-blame notes, written privately and not intended as confession, do not correlate with having done the thing being blamed for. They correlate instead with three factors: (1) exposure to repeated accusation; (2) helplessness to disprove the accusation in the environment where it is being made; and (3) pre-existing anxious or self-critical personality traits.
The specific Letby context
By the time Lucy Letby was writing the Post-it notes introduced at trial, she had been named in internal Trust reviews as a common factor across unexplained deaths. She had been removed from clinical duties. She had been told by her senior consultants that they believed she had been involved in the deaths. She had been through an HR grievance process in which she was the respondent. Her whole professional world had aligned on the proposition that she was responsible.
That is the environment in which the notes were written. They were not written during a crime. They were not written during a police interview. They were not written to any audience. They were written privately, at home, in an environment saturated with the accusation.
The full text tells a different story
The Crown’s presentation of the notes focused on specific phrases in isolation. The notes, read in full, contain contradictory lines:
- “I haven’t done anything wrong”
- “Why me”
- “I can’t do this any more”
- “I am evil I did this”
- “I am a horrible evil person”
- “The world is better off without me”
- “Kill me”
These are not the phrasings of a forensic confession. They are the phrasings of someone oscillating, on the same page, between denial and crushing self-blame. That oscillation is the psychological signature of the pattern, not an indicator of consistent admission. See our full-context reading of the notes.
What a forensic confession actually looks like
A confession, in criminal-law terms, has specific features. A forensic confession typically:
- Identifies the victim by name or specific identifying feature.
- Identifies the method of harm specifically.
- Identifies the time and location.
- Offers a motive, even if only implicit.
- Is written in a register consistent with purposeful admission.
- Is written to an audience — actual or anticipated — that can act on it.
The Letby notes do none of these. They name no baby. They describe no method. They describe no location. They describe no motive. They are written in an oscillating emotional register. They were kept entirely privately. They were not shared with anyone at any point.
What the clinical-psychology literature has to say
Psychology research on false or self-blaming admissions has, since the 1990s, documented several specific findings relevant here:
- Anxious personality structure predicts self-blame. People who score high on measures of conscientiousness and neuroticism — the kind of personality common in careful nurses — are more likely to internalise blame even without objective evidence for it.
- Sustained accusation produces identity-absorption. When a person is repeatedly told, by trusted authority figures, that they are responsible for harm, many people eventually begin to write and speak as if the accusation is true — even while simultaneously denying it. This is not a sign of truthfulness of the underlying charge; it is a known cognitive phenomenon.
- Private notes are not confessions. Notes written privately, without intended audience, do not meet the criminal-law test for admission. They are diagnostic of the state of mind of the person writing them at the moment they were written.
- Clinical-staff-accused contexts have specific patterns. Nurses and doctors accused of harm, even when exonerated, often produce private self-blame writing. The Grantham–Beverley Allitt investigation, the Vaud Hospital cases in Switzerland, and several cases in the Netherlands all produced self-blame notes from clinicians later cleared.
What the defence expert evidence on this could look like
A formal clinical-psychology expert report, applied to the Letby notes in the light of her specific context, would address the personality structure likely operative, the sustained-accusation environment at the Trust, the private (non-audience) nature of the writing, and the internal contradictions on the same page. Such a report is part of the body of expert evidence filed with the October 2025 CCRC application.
The frame a jury was asked to adopt
The jury was asked to read “I am evil I did this” as a confession. That reading is a specific, frame-dependent one. A different frame — private self-blame writing by an anxious person under sustained institutional accusation — produces a different interpretation of exactly the same words. The question for the CCRC is whether the jury had the second frame adequately presented to them.