ANGLETON, Tex., Aug. 19 - Jurors who awarded $253 million to Carol Ernst on Friday, said that although the award might seem large to outsiders, they believed in the end that the evidence justified the outcome.

Another juror, Duffy Marcotte, said, "We stuck to the facts."

He said jurors were upset by Merck's aggressive marketing of Vioxx and decided to award $229 million in punitive damages after seeing a Merck document that showed the company calculated that it would make $229 million in additional profit if changes to Vioxx's label were delayed by four months.

But some other jurors on Friday described the panel as not fully convinced of Merck's liability when the group began deliberating on Thursday.

But because the judge told them they needed to be only 51 percent in favor of one side or the other to reach a decision, 10 members of the group eventually voted against Merck on Friday, after reconsidering the evidence - including the coroner's testimony and the drug's labeling.

"Most people in there were 50-50; they really had to see a lot more of the evidence," said John Ostrom, 49, of Alvin, Tex., a remodeling service contractor, who voted with the majority.

Another juror who voted against Merck was Lorraine Blas, 44, of Pearland, Tex., who works in human resources for a distribution company. "When I went into the jury room, I was half and half," she said.

One factor that she said finally swayed the jury was another look at Merck's labeling of Vioxx, even after the company began warning doctors that the drug could be linked to "cardiovascular events" like heart attacks and strokes.

"In the first label, it didn't jump out at you that CV events were happening," Ms. Blas said. "You had to dig three levels to see it."

David Webb, 20, an apprentice electrician from Pearland, said he was "on the plaintiff's side almost the whole trial," and yet he "was kind of skeptical" on every question considered by the jury. In the end, he, too, voted for the plaintiff.

James Friudenberg, 46, of Lake Jackson, Tex., one of the two jurors who voted for Merck, described a trial in which "we were so overwhelmed with data the last six weeks, it was kind of blurry, all of it - just document after document after document."

Mr. Friudenberg, an instrument and electrical technician for a chemical company, said he did not think that Mrs. Ernst's lawyers "came up with the goods to prove Vioxx was the killer - in this case."

"Maybe in some other case," he said, "but this was the wrong case."