CENTENNIAL — The owner of the Aurora movie theater where 12 people were murdered in one of the nation’s worst mass shootings is not to blame for the attack, a jury decided Thursday.

The decision is the first in a trial against theater chain Cinemark stemming from the 2012 shooting, which also wounded 70 people. It means that Cinemark will not have to pay money to any of the survivors of the shooting or relatives of those killed in it who filed suit against the company in state court. The victims argued Cinemark’s security failings helped enable the attack.

A separate case against the theater filed in federal court is scheduled for trial in July.

“The community has spoken,” Cinemark attorney Kevin Taylor said after the verdict was announced. “Its conscience has been heard.”

The jury of five men and one woman deliberated for about four hours before reaching the decision. The verdict was read in the same Arapahoe County courtroom where the fate of the gunman was decided less than a year ago, but it lacked the same emotion.

None of the shooting’s victims were in court when the decision was announced. Instead, as this latest ripple of the shooting crested and fell, the audience consisted mostly of people paid to be there.

Outside the courtroom, the victims’ attorney, Marc Bern, sighed heavily and vowed a quick appeal.

“This is an unjust verdict,” he said.

After the shooting, approximately 60 survivors of the attack and families of those killed filed lawsuits in state and federal courts against Cinemark. Those lawsuits eventually were consolidated into two cases — one in state court and one in federal court. Among other things, the victims argued that Cinemark should have had armed guards at the Century Aurora 16 theater the night of the shooting, when 1,000 people were expected to attend the midnight premiere of the Batman film “The Dark Knight Rises.”

The plaintiffs in the state case include three parents whose children were murdered in the shooting, a man who now walks with a permanent limp and a woman who had to hold her own intestines in to survive. Because of how the trial was structured, though, none of them testified during the case.

Instead, the jury was asked only to assess whether Cinemark should have known about the risk of a mass shooting and whether the theater had failed to protect patrons. If Cinemark had been found liable, the victims could have testified about their injuries and medical expenses before a separate jury tasked with assigning monetary amounts to their suffering.

Bern said that structure may have hurt his clients’ case. But he said his appeal, which could lead to a new trial if successful, will focus on other types of excluded evidence.

The judge, for instance, did not allow Bern to tell jurors about a U.S. Department of Homeland Security memo released two months before the shooting that warned movie theaters could be targets for terrorist attacks.

Bern has said that memo should have put Cinemark on notice to improve its security.

The theater company spent more than $500,000 on five expert witnesses who testified in its defense during the trial, according to testimony. The plaintiffs called one expert witness in their case, who had been paid about $22,000.

“Unfortunately,” Bern said about his clients, “I think they are going to have to wait some period of time before they get justice.”

Taylor, though, said justice was done last August, when the gunman was sentenced to 12 consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole plus another 3,318 years — one of the longest prison sentences in American history.

That killer, he said after the verdict Thursday, was “completely unpredictable, unforeseeable, unpreventable and unstoppable.” To put blame on Cinemark would have unjustly extended liability to businesses across the country for things they could not possibly predict, he said.

“The inescapable conclusion,” Taylor said, “was that this was a horrible tragedy.”

John Ingold: 303-954-1068, jingold@denverpost.com or @johningold