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 U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson on Friday rejected a motion
for summary judgment filed by lawyers for Texas-based Cinemark USA
to dismiss the lawsuits.
Nearly 30 victims or the families of those killed or wounded in the
rampage have sued Cinemark, owner of the theater complex where the
massacre took place.
In general, the lawsuits claim Cinemark had lax security at its
theater in the Denver suburb of Aurora when a gunman opened fired
during a midnight screening of the Batman film "The Dark Knight
Rises."
Jackson issued a similar ruling in April 2013 when lawyers for
Cinemark argued that theater employees could not have anticipated
having to deal with "a madman's mass murder."
 "It would be patently unfair, and legally unsound, to impose on
Cinemark, a private business in the entertainment industry, the duty
and burden to have foreseen and prevented the criminal equivalent of
a meteor falling from the sky," the motion by Cinemark's lawyers
said.
The accused gunman, James Holmes, 26, has pleaded not guilty by
reason of insanity, and is set to go on trial in December.
Cinemark, owned by Cinemark Holdings Inc, renewed its bid to have
the case tossed, arguing that the plaintiffs have not developed
enough facts to justify a trial, a notion that Jackson rejected.
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Jackson noted that 80 of Cinemark's 300 theaters did hire off-duty
police or private security firms for the midnight viewing of the
Batman movie, but the Aurora theater chose not to.
Jackson stressed in his opinion that he was not ruling on the merits
of the case, merely that the issue should be left up to a jury to
decide.
"I reiterate that this Court is in no way holding as a matter of law
that Cinemark should have known of the danger of someone entering
one of its theaters through the back door and randomly shooting
innocent patrons," Jackson wrote.
"A genuine fact dispute must be resolved by the trier of fact, not
by a court's granting summary judgment."
(Editing by Daniel Wallis and Eric Walsh)
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