A Portland man who raped a mortgage broker he lured to his mother’s apartment under false pretenses has been found guilty for the second time — 17 years after his original conviction.

First found guilty by 11 out of 12 jurors during a 2007 trial, Daniel Bluestein had already finished his 11⅔-year prison sentence by the time the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed non-unanimous jury verdicts in 2020.

The Oregon Supreme Court last year determined the ban would be retroactive — undoing almost 500 cases, according to a state Department of Justice spokesperson.

In Multnomah County, prosecutors believe only a few of the overturned cases have gone to trial again, and Bluestein’s case was by far the oldest.

Some of the physical evidence from the case had been lost and jurors weren’t told that Bluestein had been tried and convicted once before.

The woman at the center of the case returned to testify again — saying she was coincidentally in a hospital waiting room when Bluestein struck up a flirtatious conversation on July 19, 2006. The woman explained she was married with four children, but made plans to visit when Bluestein said his mother needed a mortgage broker.

When she arrived at the Vista St. Clair apartments in the Goose Hollow neighborhood of Southwest Portland the next day, Bluestein was alone.

“I instantly felt like something was off,” she testified.

After the attack, the woman fled the apartment and called her best friend in tears and went to a hospital later that night, according to trial testimony.

The Oregonian/OregonLive isn’t naming the woman because she’s a sex crime victim.

In his own testimony, Bluestein, now 49, said there was no talk of mortgage brokering when they first met and that he felt guilty because he was cheating on his wife.

“I try not to think of her anymore,” he said of the woman.

Bluestein advanced an argument similar to the one he made in the first trial: that the woman regretted a consensual encounter.

Prosecutor Ryan Solomon, however, said the woman could have simply kept quiet if she didn’t want her husband to know of an affair, noting that surveillance footage showed her leaving the apartment tower with a “1,000-yard stare” and missing some of her belongings.

“She didn’t want to come forward at first,” Solomon said. “Mr. Bluestein was preying on that exact type of mentality — the difficulty of victims to come forward.”

The Multnomah County jury of five women and seven men deliberated for about six hours over two days before returning a guilty verdict on charges of first-degree rape, sodomy and sex abuse.

The woman embraced her family once the verdict was read aloud, while Bluestein slumped his head slightly.

With his punishment already served, Bluestein likely doesn’t face additional jail time but could be required to register as a sex offender during an Aug. 16 sentencing hearing.

—Zane Sparling covers breaking news and courts for The Oregonian/OregonLive. Reach him at 503-319-7083, zsparling@oregonian.com or @pdxzane.

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