This is the moment a wife killer’s lawyer throttles and violently shakes his young female assistant to prove that what his client is accused of could not really have happened, causing her to lose her balance and nearly fall in the process.

The stunt however did not work anyway because the court in the Brazilian municipality of Guarapuava sentenced his client Luis Felipe Manvailer to 31 years in prison on 10th May.

The jury had earlier found him guilty of strangling his wife, 29-year-old lawyer Tatiane Spitzer, to death and throwing her body from their fourth-floor balcony in July 2018.

The case is one of Brazil’s most high-profile murder trials of recent years and an episode from the seven-day court case ended up racking up thousands of views when it was posted to Twitter by local journalist Guilherme Bittar on 10th May.

The clip, which has since racked up over 92,000 views, shows the defendant’s top lawyer, Claudio Dalledone, violently grabbing assistant lawyer Maria Eduarda Lacerda by the neck and shaking her around.

The footage shows how the male lawyer’s heavy-handed crime scene recreation causes the young woman to lose her balance, and she is forced to grab onto a table to prevent herself from falling to the ground.

Bittar wrote alongside the clip: “This deplorable scene was played out by the lawyer defending Manvailer, who has just been sentenced for killing Tatiane Spitzner, in Guarapuava. He did this inside a courtroom! The lawyer, just like his client, should have left in handcuffs. Absurd.”

The episode was ostensibly staged to simulate what allegedly took place at the time of the crime. After the negative reaction to the clip, the Lawyer and his assistant released a video in which they denied accusations of mistreatment or violence.

Dalledone said: “Maria Eduarda took part in this role play to show the jurors that strangulation would be impossible without leaving a mark on the defendant. We rehearsed this role play. She was uninjured. She is an excellent junior lawyer.”

Maria Eduarda said that she took part in the role play out of “love for the cause”, adding that “everything was planned beforehand”.

Brazilian feminist, lawyer and columnist Isabela Del Monde has since argued that “physical aggression is not tolerable in the exercise of any defence and does not count as simulation”.