As he tries to save Scott Peterson from death row, Mark Geragos may have another worry: disciplinary action from the California bar.

On Friday, the same day a Redwood City jury convicted Peterson of capital murder, a Florida civil lawyer mailed a formal complaint against Geragos to the state bar, alleging the high-profile Los Angeles attorney violated ethical rules with the display of a fishing boat near the courthouse during deliberations.

The lawyer, John Thompson, is not connected to the Peterson case and learned of the boat only though media coverage. The bar, however, accepts complaints from anyone who purports to know of wrongdoing by attorneys, regardless of their relationship, or lack of one, to the case at hand.

Thompson, whose practice focuses on indecency claims, asserted in the complaint that, by placing the boat in a parking lot Geragos owned a block and a half from the courthouse, the defense attorney broke a bar rule prohibiting lawyers from contact with jurors.

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"It was a stunt to show up the judge or influence the jury with nonverbal communications in hopes they might see the boat," Thompson said.

The defense used the 14-foot boat in a video recreation of the crime — a video the judge ultimately ruled inadmissible. Prosecutors argued that Peterson used his boat to dispose of his wife's body in the San Francisco Bay.

Mark Geragos

The display of the model boat, complete with concrete weights and the dummy that represented Laci Peterson, so close to the courthouse and in the midst of deliberations was criticized by legal experts and citizens alike.

Thompson said Tuesday that he became angry while watching television coverage in his Coral Gables home because the boat fed into negative stereotypes about lawyers.

"Lawyers are just below Fallujah insurgents on the public respect scale, and we labor under that, and Mark Geragos, to put it mildly, doesn't help," said Thompson.

He has sued manufacturers of violent video games and, last year, he asked the judge in the Kobe Bryant case to bar cameras from the preliminary hearing because of the anticipated explicit testimony.

A spokesman for the bar association, E.J. Bernacki, said that confidentiality rules prohibited him from confirming or denying complaints from Thompson or others about Geragos until after the bar conducted an investigation and took some formal action.

In the past, the association has acknowledged receiving large volumes of complaints against a particular attorney in very public cases. Fox News' personality Bill O'Reilly, for example, led a campaign against the defense attorney who represented David Westerfield, who was convicted of killing 8-year-old Danielle van Dam.

"In that particular case, it ended up clogging our intake line so other people couldn't get through to complain about their attorneys," Bernacki said. "Here we're not at the point where we're in a crisis situation. Frankly, I've only heard through reporters that we've gotten complaints."

Bernacki said complaints from citizens without ties to a case are rare and do not often result in disciplinary action.

"In my experience, it's mostly clients and other attorneys whose complaints really seem to cut through. The rules of professional conduct are really geared much more to the conduct of the attorney with the client," he said.

Geragos has a clean record with the bar. Thompson, the complainant, was reprimanded by the Florida Bar Association in 1993 for what bar records refer to as unspecified "personal behavior."

Westerfield's attorney, Steven Feldman, bristled Tuesday when informed that a defense attorney in another much-watched trial was being accused of misconduct by someone outside the case.

"I have no personal knowledge of what happened here, but many times these complaints are lodged by people who are out for their own self-aggrandizement," said Feldman.

O'Reilly accused Feldman of unethical behavior because he tried to win an acquittal for Westerfield.

Feldman was cleared of any wrongdoing.

Like Geragos, Feldman was bound by a trial judge's gag order and prohibited from addressing the issue.

"It's extraordinarily difficult to hear attacks on your personal integrity by people who are completely ignorant of your obligations under the Constitution," Feldman said.

Gerald Uelman, a professor at the Santa Clara School of Law, called Thompson's complaint a long shot.

"I would think it's a real stretch to suggest that there would be evidence to suggest he did this to intentionally influence the jury," Uelman said, adding that the trial judge could have addressed the matter if he felt it was a violation of the gag order.