The issue of the death penalty has elicited debate since the ancient times. People belief in the sanctity of life that human are to live until they die of natural death rather than induced killing and as a result of capital offences. As early as 1293 the Prince of Wales was hanged after he attacked King Edward of England. Since then, there has been the debate of where it is legal or moral to use the death penalty to meet justice of the accused. However, through history there has been declined use of the death penalty in many countries with a few remaining with the practice including the United States of America. In the past years death penalty was a norm. In the 7th Century B.C., death penalty was the punishment that was meted on all crimes in Athens. In Europe criminal were hanged and stoned. Others were hard-pressed to fatality under stones while others were burnt alive. Period before 20th Century crime committed against the authority was penalised by death sentences, and people had no much complain on the morality of the exercise. The established authority in this period included monarchy, the church and the states. Religion was the cause of most death in the past centuries. ‘The Inquisition was a natural Catholic response to the Protestant Reformation, and it demanded death by burning at the stake for many thousands of heretics who refused to bend to the authority of Catholicism’ (Baird and Rosenbaum). In the early 20th Century people questioned the morality of the death sentence. They argued that because the lack of prison made the death penalty a reasonable excuse, the development of prisons called for reduced death penalty for imprisonment for varied time depending on the offences. Death sentence is the execution of individual by the state as a chastisement of crime. It is the severest sentence that a person can get and also the heaviest that the state can use to deter or prevent furtherance of the crime. It has been used throughout history by state to deter chaos that threatened state power and crime such as spying and military malpractices was punishable by death. In recent movement, in the U.S death sentence has been condemned as a cruel act against the right to life of mentally retarded persons. Over the past two decades, there has been a call for decency in handling the death penalty. The United state supreme court also found that death sentences as an unusual punishment when applied to juveniles and in crime that does not involve death of the victims such as rape of kids. This development led to the abandonment of death sentences in New Mexico, Connecticut, New Jersey, Illinois, and New York States. Nevertheless, the United State public are divided on the subject of death sentences. Some argue for it while other see it as an unnecessary crime committed to individual who might be innocent of the crime they are accused of. The debate is persistent and discordant. This paper discusses the argument for and against death sentence in the U.S and the rest of the world (Baird et al)