`SEARCH' YIELDS FEW NEW ANSWERS.

Byline: Fred Shuster Daily News Staff Writer

Title: ``The Search for Justice''

Author: Robert L. Shapiro, with Larkin Warren

Data: 363 pages; Warner Books; $24.95

Our rating: Two Stars

Three pages before the end of his account of the O.J. Simpson murder case, defense attorney Robert Shapiro gets to the caveat that should have been printed in raised letters on the jacket.

Attorney-client privilege ``governed the writing of this book. I cannot share confidences,'' he states, adding that while he can take the reader into a room, he cannot always repeat what was said there.

This means, to choose a particularly far-out example, if a client happened to admit behind closed doors to knifing two people to death on a June night in Brentwood and then leaving a trail of evidence or if the author has strong suspicions of same, it won't be divulged here.

In fact, Shapiro hints what his book will be in essence when he subtitles the story a ``brief'' on the Simpson case. In legal terms, a defense brief consists of the essential facts of a client's case.

If you followed any amount of the trial, you're familiar with this brief - evidence contamination and planting, police conspiracy, a ``rush to judgment'' - an argument prosecutor Christopher Darden dubs in his own far more compelling book, ``so much smoke you won't be able to see the mirrors.''

Shapiro seems to want to have it both ways in the oddly titled and only mildly interesting ``The Search for Justice,'' co-written with former magazine editor Larkin Warren. On the one hand, the authors stress the duty of a defense attorney to exploit every angle in the quest to plant reasonable doubt in a panelist's mind. The prologue is devoted to this civics lesson.

On the other hand, Shapiro argues that the prosecution made fatal errors by building its case on the testimony of police detectives Mark Furhman and Phil Vannatter, boring the jury with DNA evidence and having Simpson put on a glove that seemed not to fit properly. Shapiro also says anybody who refuses to serve on a jury has no right to criticize a verdict.

While he tempers trial scenes with details of the toll the yearlong televised case took on his home life, the best parts of ``The Search for Justice'' are passages revealing the backbiting, jealousy and betrayal that racked the defense camp.

Shapiro, who reveled in the celebrity the case gave him, blames co-counsel F. Lee Bailey for the chorus of leaks and gossip that surfaced in East Coast newspapers, takes Johnnie Cochran to task for successfully dealing the race card ``from the bottom of the deck'' and aims some shots at Judge Lance Ito for not moving the case along quicker and in effect allowing the inmates to run the asylum.

But that nagging attorney-client privilege prevents Shapiro from discussing too many aspects of the case, including whether Simpson's Dr. Seuss-inspired ``did not, could not, would not'' statement to Ito while waiving his right to testify was truly improvised. Or exactly why the defendant, who was ultimately acquitted of two counts of murder, didn't take the stand in the first place.

Or what Shapiro really believed happened that June night.

One thing's clear. Shapiro and Simpson won't be spending any time on the golf course soon. ``We never had a personal relationship before,'' Shapiro says of his former client, ``and we won't have one in the future.''

Poor Shapiro. By book's end, the author ostensibly seeks forgiveness from a community that apparently detests him for his part in what many of his peers consider a sham defense built on race, innuendo, character assassination and jury nullification.

He's shunned by fellow worshipers at his temple, strangers are screaming, ``Guilty!'' at him as he walks with his family, prosecutor Marcia Clark won't acknowledge his presence when they run into each other, Simpson owes him money, and even his own wife wishes he'd never taken the case.

Shapiro leaves the final line of his memoir unwritten: ``Why doesn't anybody like me anymore?''

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1) ``We never had a personal relationship before , and we won't have one in the future,'' says Robert Shapiro, left, of former client O.J. Simpson.

Hans Gutknecht/Daily News

(2) no caption (Book cover - The Search for Justice)