COLUMBIA, S.C. — The South Carolina Court of Appeals has denied a request for appeal to Nathaniel Rowland, the man convicted of murdering University of South Carolina student Samantha Josephson after she mistakenly got into his car.
The court issued their ruling Thursday, over three years after Rowland was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole for the slaying that drew national attention.
Rowland had claimed the judge made three key mistakes in his trial: first, not suppressing evidence gained during a police search of his vehicle during a traffic stop; second, allowing an expert testimony about matching handwriting; and third, by allowing a DNA expert to testify about a mixture of his DNA being found in evidence.
But the appeals court said Columbia Police were justified in searching his vehicle on the night he was stopped near Columbia's Five Points district (which was where Josephson went missing) a day after the killing. Rowland's lawyer argued the officer who stopped him was acting on a hunch, but the court said police pulled over a vehicle that appeared to match the one sent out by law enforcement after Josephson disappeared. They also said Rowland had no identification on him, there was a smell of marijuana in his vehicle, and he ran when the officer started asking him questions, all things that justified officers probing his vehicle further.
They also rejected his claim that a bloody note found in his vehicle with Josephson's DNA on it shouldn't have been admitted because a handwriting expert had matched words written on it to previous samples of Rowland's handwriting. The court ruled the expert's testimony, which said it was "probable" that the handwriting matched, was still admissible because it still had value to the jury, even if it wasn't 100 percent conclusive.
The court also ruled similarly on DNA collected from a trash can at Rowland's girlfriend's house. The materials showed that it contained a mixture of DNA likely from Rowland and Josephson. The items included what prosecutors said was the murder weapon.
Josephson had been out with friends in Columbia's Five Points district on March 29, 2019 when she decided to call an Uber to go home. Prosecutors say she mistakenly got into Rowland's car. A short time later he killed her, and eventually drove her to a wooded area in Clarendon County, some 70 miles from Columbia.
Her body was found hours later by two turkey hunters in the area. Rowland was arrested by Columbia Police after the traffic stop in Columbia about 10 hours later.
The case led to some security changes with both Uber and Lyft. In 2023, President Joe Biden signed a law named in Josephson's honor called "Sami's Law." It require sthe Government Accountability Office to study, and submit a biennial report to Congress regarding the incidence of assaults involving drivers and passengers of for-hire vehicles such as Uber and Lyft. It would also require ridesharing company drivers to prominently display lighted signs and a scannable QR code as a safety regulation and criminalize misrepresentation of being a driver of a ride-sharing service nationwide.