Bar Assn. Feuds Over Honoring Clark, Darden : Lawyers: Prosecutors were nominated for award, but trustees vote down idea. It would be slap in face of Simpson jury, some say.

The latest casualty of the fallout from the O.J. Simpson trial is good relations among some members of the Los Angeles County Bar Assn.

Factions of the 21,000-member association are at odds over whether Simpson prosecutors Marcia Clark and Christopher A. Darden should be named 1995 Trial Lawyers of the Year for their feisty but unsuccessful attempt to convict the former athlete of double murder.

As it stands, the bar’s trustees have nixed the recommendation of Clark and Darden that was made by the executive committee of the bar’s criminal law section.

Bar association President Laurie D. Zelon said recognizing the prosecutors would undermine the public’s confidence in the Simpson jury’s not guilty verdicts and would be a slap in the jury’s face.

The decision enraged some of the rank-and-file bar association members, prompting some resignations and triggering a plan to review the award-nominating process of the bar’s criminal law section.

Zelon has downplayed the controversy, saying she expected the executive committee to submit new names and move on.

Most of the lawyers who have called or written her directly about the trustees’ reversal of the awards to Darden and Clark have been non-bar members, she said.

“As a matter of fact, I haven’t been contacted by anyone about it for about two weeks,” Zelon said, suggesting the rancor had subsided.

But other criminal lawyers disagreed.

Herb Lapin, a prosecutor who is president of the county’s Assn. of Deputy District Attorneys, used his group’s newsletter, mailed last week, to urge his members to withdraw their support of the bar.

In an interview, Lapin called the explanation for withholding the awards from Clark and Darden ridiculous and blasted the bar as a bastion of members of big firms “who don’t have the slightest clue about what’s going on in the real world.”

A member of the criminal law section’s executive committee, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said at least a dozen resignation letters have been received as a result of the trustees’ action. He insisted that Clark’s and Darden’s names will be resubmitted to the trustees for the trial lawyers’ award in a few months, after a cooling-off period.

This is not the county bar’s first controversy over one of its awards.

The group was split when it gave its 1991 Trial Judge of the Year to the then-Superior Court Judge Joyce Karlin, who had come under fire, particularly from sections of the African American community, after she gave a probation sentence and a fine to a grocer convicted of manslaughter in the shooting death of a 15-year-old black girl.

The executive committee member said the seed of the current controversy was sown last year when a local black lawyers association named Simpson defense lawyer Carl E. Douglas its Trial Lawyer of the Year--an honor for which Douglas was nominated six months before Simpson was arrested.

In what the source called a “knee-jerk reaction,” county bar members who were supporters of the prosecution nominated Clark for the bar’s annual award. Darden was nominated later, after he took on a major role in the trial.

Concerned about the rancor, the source said, the executive committee of criminal lawyers has agreed to review its nominating procedure.