A judge sentenced former Lancaster city police officer Andrew Scott Selby to 22 and a half to 57 years in prison today after a jury found him guilty earlier this year of raping and sexually assaulting three different underage girls years ago.

In handing down the sentence, Senior Judge William P. Mahon told Selby, of Pequea Township, that his actions decades ago were “insidious” and that the passage of time had not lessened their impact on the victims.

“The violation of the rule of law that you swore to uphold,” Mahon said, “is reprehensible.”

And, Mahon said, the many years Selby will spend behind bars are meant to serve as a “message” to other police officers and the public that a position of public trust should never be abused.

District Attorney Heather Adams said that she hopes today’s sentence “brings a measure of peace to the victims who suffered at the hands of the defendant.”

“While we can never undo the harms that occurred in the past, today’s act of justice is an important steppingstone in these victims’ paths toward healing,” Adams said.

A jury had found the 56-year-old Selby guilty of one count of rape forcible compulsion, one count of rape of a person less than 13 years of age, three counts of sexual assault and one count each of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse of a person less than 13 and statutory sexual assault following a three-day trial in June. Selby, of the 700 block of Baumgardner Road, raped and sexually assaulted the victims, who he encountered in his job as a city police officer in the 1990s.

Assistant District Attorney Elizabeth Lapp, who prosecuted the case alongside Assistant District Attorney Fritz Haverstick, argued that the “callousness” of Selby’s actions in abusing his position as a trusted member of the community warranted the tough sentence imposed.

Lapp specifically cited Selby’s rape of a 16-year-old girl whose rape by another man a week earlier he had been assigned to investigate. Mahon expressed disgust at the incident, telling Selby he has “seen most everything” in his years on the bench and is no longer surprised at the level of cruelty people are capable of showing to one another, but “that one I hadn’t seen before.”

“I can’t imagine that you thought so little of [the victim], so little of yourself and so little of your fellow officers and what they represent,” Mahon said.

That same victim told the court prior to Selby being sentenced that his actions “further eroded my already distorted perception” that “nothing was safe.” The victim also noted that she and others who Selby abused came from backgrounds that included “shattered families and tragedy,” saying that his actions amounted to those of a “psychopath.”

“Cops should be held to a higher standard of conduct than civilians,” the victim said, but Selby “drew to us like a shark to blood.”

Where Selby erred, the victim said, is in underestimating the resilience of those he abused.

A second victim wrote a letter to the court which Lapp read aloud in which she explained that Selby “failed” her in his position as a police officer and swore to never disbelieve her children the same way she was disbelieved.

Though Selby himself chose not to speak prior to being sentenced, two of his personal friends described him as a dedicated worker and devoted husband. One of Selby’s friends who spoke on his behalf said that the man who moments earlier had been deemed a Sexually Violent Predator by the court “is not the Scott I know.”

But while on paper Selby appeared to be a law-abiding citizen, numerous incidents over the years indicated that he was “a different person,” Mahon said. Lapp cited a psychologist who analyzed Selby and spoke as a witness on his behalf whose own assessment of him described him as a “pathological liar.”

Prior to dismissing court Mahon commended Lapp for telling the jury in her opening and closing arguments of the trial that the justice system had “failed” the victims years ago, saying he had never seen someone “have the guts to stand up and say that.” Mahon also commended Lancaster City Bureau of Police Det. Jessica Higgins, who filed the charges, and the 10 city police officers who were present in the gallery to witness the sentencing because “one of their own has done the unthinkable.”

Police are entrusted to enforce the law with honestly and integrity, Mahon said, “and without that, we have Mad Max.”

Adams also thanked Det. Higgins as well as Lapp and Haverstick “for standing up for what is right, fighting for the truth and holding a man in a position of public trust accountable for his actions.”