A former Harrisburg man convicted of repeatedly raping a girl starting when she was 3 or 4 years old got a fair trial, despite his claims to the contrary, a state appeals court panel has decided.

In rejecting Anthony Kemberling’s appeal, the Superior Court judges discounted his claim that he would have been acquitted of the crimes if several character witnesses, including two of his brothers, would have been allowed to testify.

Instead, Kemberling, now 52, was found guilty by a Lebanon County jury of raping and sexually assaulting the child between August 2009 and August 2011 at a home in South Annville Township. The assaults only stopped when the girl told her mother about them, investigators said.

Kemberling is serving a 30- to 60-year prison term for the crimes. In sentencing Kemberling, county Judge Bradford H. Charles told him he’ll likely die behind bars.

On appeal, Kemberling, who has insisted he is innocent, claimed his lawyer was ineffective for not calling character witnesses during his trial in 2016. As Judge Alice Beck Dubow noted in the Superior Court’s opinion, those witnesses were his two brothers and his aunt.

All three would have testified that they never saw Kemberling act inappropriately around children, Dubow wrote, and the aunt would have said Kemberling was a good role model for young people because he enjoyed karate.

Those statements “did not constitute proper character evidence and that its absence from (Kemberling’s) trial, therefore, did not prejudice him,” Dubow found. None of those witnesses, who saw Kemberling only sporadically, were able to testify regarding his reputation in the community, she noted.