Only one of the four Democrats seeking the party’s nomination for Brooklyn district attorney, Arnold Kriss, appears to be following the recommendation of the city bar association that candidates refrain from soliciting campaign contributions directly.

The other candidates – the four term incumbent, Charles “Joe” Hynes; the former head of Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s anti-corruption division, Mark Peters; and a state senator, John Sampson – have all chosen not to follow a formal opinion issued by the Association of the Bar of the City of New York in May 1994. It states, “candidates for New York state attorney general, district attorney, and other offices closely tied to the judicial process should not personally solicit campaign contributions.”

The bar association also instructs candidates to “avoid learning the names of those contributing to their campaigns.” At the time of the ruling, Mr. Hynes’s then campaign manager, Mark Arbogast, told the New York Law Journal that the bar association’s ruling is “laudable.”

“They may be laudable, but they’re not workable,” Mr. Hynes’s current campaign spokesman, Mortimer Matz, said yesterday. He acknowledged that the district attorney does not adhere to the Bar Association guidelines on contributions. Aides to Messrs. Peters and Sampson also said their candidates are not following the bar association’s ruling, which is not legally binding.

Spokesmen for the candidates in the Manhattan district attorney’s race – in which the longtime incumbent, Robert Morgenthau, is facing a former aide of his and former judge of state Supreme Court, Leslie Crocker Snyder – did not return requests for comment regarding the contenders’ attitudes toward the bar association guidelines. The two Manhattan candidates have each raised more than $1 million for the campaign.

Mr. Kriss, a former deputy commissioner of trials in the police department during the Koch administration, told The New York Sun yesterday: “I have not – either orally or in writing – asked any individual for a campaign contribution.”

“I’m taking flak for not even signing thank-you notes,” Mr. Kriss said. He explained that donors have called his campaign to complain of the candidate’s perceived ingratitude – and he doesn’t know who they are.

Mr. Kriss acknowledged that he has attended fund-raising events organized by his campaign’s finance committee, but he noted that the bar association guidelines say candidates “may attend a fund-raising dinner or affair.”

“We don’t put paper bags over people’s heads when they come to fundraisers,” Mr. Kriss said, “but I do my damnedest not to know who’s giving me money.”

Mr. Kriss trails the pack in fundraising, having collected about $400,000 in contributions as of the most recent campaign finance filing. The Hynes campaign reported last month that it had raised more than $770,000, Mr. Peters reported he had raised more than $600,000, and Mr. Sampson reported that he had garnered more than $550,000 in donations. Candidates for district attorney are not eligible for public matching funds.

The Peters campaign manager, Sara Forman, said, “What is really important to the people of Brooklyn is that they get a new district attorney, and we have the money to compete with Hynes. And we got it all above-board.”

Ms. Forman said the Peters campaign has rejected donations from lawyers with cases pending before the district attorney’s office.

Mr. Sampson said through a spokesman, “We’ve all had to raise money the way Joe Hynes does. I, unlike the district attorney, however, would never ask my own staffers for campaign contributions.”

Mr. Matz, the Hynes spokesman, said the incumbent did take contributions from prosecutors in his own office in past runs, but he added, “No donations have been accepted in this campaign from assistant district attorneys.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Peters received a boost when a Democratic congressman from Brooklyn, Major Owens, announced that he will endorse the former Spitzer lieutenant, at a press conference scheduled for this afternoon. The endorsement “will highlight Mr. Peters’s record as a corruption fighter,” the congressman’s son, Chris Owens, said in a statement.