Peers is a word that could be unpacked to mean more than just fellow citizens though, and to prove that it originally meant only fellow citizens runs into all the problems inherent in authorial intent multiplied by the number of people who worked on the constitution. Hence the need for supreme court interpretation.
Peers in context have been interpreted to mean your fellow citizens, nothing more.
Although I'd like to note that letting a jury of bankers sit on a financial crime might mean no banker ever got convicted. So the whole more exacting definition of peers argument has some definite problems.
> Peers is a word that could be unpacked to mean more than just fellow citizens though, and to prove that it originally meant only fellow citizens runs into all the problems inherent in authorial intent multiplied by the number of people who worked on the constitution.
No, it absolutely does not, because neither the phrase nor any alternative phrase on the subject incorporating a reference to “peers” appears in the Constitution, which instead provides (in the Sixth Amendment) for an “impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law”. (It is a common rephrasing of a guarantee—“the lawful judgment of his peers”—in Magna Carta which unmistakably was an product of the barons’ insistence that members of their formal social station should render verdicts against them.)
Peers in context have been interpreted to mean your fellow citizens, nothing more.
Although I'd like to note that letting a jury of bankers sit on a financial crime might mean no banker ever got convicted. So the whole more exacting definition of peers argument has some definite problems.