Philly lawyer gets 25 to 40 years for sex assaults on girls

Saying "what we sow, we reap," a Common Pleas Court judge today sentenced Philadelphia lawyer Larry Charles to 25 to 50 years in prison for raping and sexually assaulting six girls over an eight-year period.

Charles, 50, was arrested Jan. 15 when a sheriff's deputy found him with a partially clad 14-year-old girl in a lawyers' lounge at the Criminal Justice Center, which was closed for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. An investigation found that Charles had been sexually assaulting six girls, ages 11 to 17, since 1999.

Common Pleas Judge Albert Stallone, who was brought in from Berks County to try the case, said, "Mr. Charles, for the last 10 months I've been trying to find something in your life that would mitigate the 16 offenses on these girls . . . I couldn't find any."