A Rikers Island inmate was sentenced Wednesday to 10 years behind bars for stabbing a city Correction officer in a brutal unprovoked attack last fall, prosecutors said. 

Dennis Applewhite, 29 – who was locked away on a murder charge – went up to the 28-year-old officer and stabbed him in the back of the head with an eight-inch piece of sharpened metal inside the Anna M. Cross Center around 4:45 p.m. Oct. 31, according to the Bronx District Attorney’s Office. 

Applewhite was rearrested and told the court during his arraignment a day later that he intended to plead guilty. He officially pleaded guilty to first-degree attempted assault in February, prosecutors said. 

Then on Wednesday, Bronx Supreme Court Justice Ralph Fabrizio sentenced him to 10 years in prison and five years of post-release supervision.

“The defendant stabbed the victim, a DOC Correction Officer, a dozen times in the head with a sharpened metal,” Bronx District Attorney Darcel D. Clark said in a statement. “This was a brazen, unprovoked attack against a Correction Officer who was working his shift in the Protective Custody Unit in Rikers Island.”

The officer, who suffered cuts on his head and a puncture wound on the right side of his neck, was treated at Elmhurst Hospital after the attack and continues to have trouble moving his neck.

“This was an unprovoked heinous and callous attack on one of our dedicated officers, who was simply doing their job,” DOC Commissioner Louis Molina said at the time. “We will not tolerate any assaults on our Members of Service who show up to work each day to keep our jails safe.”

Applewhite is being held at Rikers as he awaits trial for the alleged murder of his pregnant girlfriend in her Lower East Side apartment on Nov. 11, 2021. He reportedly shot 27-year-old Brittani Duffy, who was three months pregnant at the time, in the neck.