It was an unusual reaction to a state prison sentence, the Lancaster County judge admitted Tuesday.

After being sentenced to 5½ to 15 years in prison for robbery, the young city man asked his lawyer to give the judge a message:

"Thank you."

Edward William Kempton Jr., 20, admitted to Judge Joseph Madenspacher that he served as the getaway driver during three different armed robberies of store clerks in the summer of 2008.

None of the victims was hurt, but Kempton readily acknowledged his actions were wrong.

"I fell off and fell off really hard," Kempton told the judge.

Madenspacher noted that Kempton had managed to build a respectable life for himself that included a job, a wife and a family, despite a difficult and unhappy childhood.

But the series of robberies were serious offenses, Madenspacher said, "and I can't treat these lightly."

After Madenspacher imposed sentence, Kempton leaned over and whispered to his defense attorney Cory Miller.

"Mr. Kempton thinks it's a fair sentence and wants to thank you for your time and consideration," Miller told the judge "and a fair sentence."

"Most people don't tell me they think my sentences are fair. In fact, it's very unusual," Madenspacher told Kempton. "I hope things work out for you."

"That's a good step forward. A state prison sentence is not a walk in the park," Madenspacher said.

Kempton was abandoned by his parents as a toddler, Miller said, and lived with his grandparents until their deaths when he was 14.

He was then placed in a series of foster homes that Miller described as "not appropriate."

Kempton graduated from high school, worked at a local restaurant, got married and started a family.

But friends introduced him to the drug PCP, an addictive hallucinogen, which Miller said "assisted him in this spiral."

The robberies, Miller said, were motivated solely by a need for money to buy more drugs.

"He is adamant that he allowed it to happened and takes responsibility," Miller told the judge, emphasizing that Kempton was the driver and not the gunman in any of the robberies.

Assistant District Attorney Mark Fetterman agreed that Kempton had accepted responsibility for his crimes.

But such behavior, Fetterman added, "cannot be tolerated."

Fetterman said charges are pending against Kempton's accused accomplices.

• Madenspacher also sentenced a second man Tuesday, for a series of crimes including robbery, drug deliveries and fleeing police — an incident in which a city policeman was hurt.

Tyshon Gray, 22, of Lancaster, was sentenced to 6 to 12 years in state prison and ordered to pay $4,570 restitution.

Gray fled the area after robbing a man at gunpoint in 2005, the judge was told.

He then returned to Lancaster and was charged with possessing marijuana twice in 2008 near city schools.

In October 2008, Assistant District Attorney Deborah Muzereus said, he sold cocaine on two different occasions to an undercover police officer.

Then in May 2009, as a city policeman tried to arrest him on warrants, he drove away, knocking the officer to the ground.

He was taken into custody last July on warrants.

Defense attorney Samuel Encarnacion told the judge "a lack of maturity" seems to be the "thread of consistency" in his client's series of legal problems.

"To say you've made bad choices is an understatement," Madenspacher told Gray.

"Since the eighth grade, you said you wanted to sell drugs," Madenspacher noted. "That's not exactly a career goal."

jkelley@lnpnews.com