Hernandez's legal team appealed, claiming that Mexican Americans, although white, were treated as a class apart and subject to social discrimination in Jackson County, where the case had been tried, and therefore were deserving of 14th amendment protection. Their task was then to prove that Mexicans were being discriminated and were excluded from the grand jury and jury. Hernandez's defense lawyers demonstrated that, although numerous Mexican Americans were citizens and had otherwise qualified for jury duty in Jackson County, during the previous 25 years no Mexican Americans (or, more precisely, no one with a Hispanic surname) were among the 6,000 persons chosen to serve on juries. This resulted in Hernandez having been deprived of equal protection of the law under the Fourteenth Amendment, as juries were restricted by ethnicity.