Monge was the last inmate to be executed before an unofficial moratorium on execution that lasted for more than four years while most death penalty cases were on appeal, culminating in the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Furman v. Georgia in 1972, invalidating all existing death penalty statutes as written.

He was convicted and sentenced to death for murdering his wife, Leonarda, and three of their ten children after she discovered he was sexually abusing their 13-year-old daughter, Diann Kissell.

[3] He had no prior felony convictions; in 1961, however, he abandoned his family for two months and served a short jail sentence in Louisiana for vagrancy.

In January 1966, Governor John Arthur Love suspended all executions in Colorado, pending a referendum on capital punishment by voters.

[6] Monge was buried in Greenwood Pioneer Cemetery in Cañon City, Colorado in the pauper's section set aside for deceased inmates of the state penitentiary.

[9] Opponents of capital punishment, in an attempt to abolish the death penalty, waged a national litigation campaign that ultimately found its way to the Supreme Court of the United States.

The period of this "unofficial" moratorium on capital punishment began on June 2, 1967, with the execution of Luis Monge in Colorado, and continued through the 1972 Supreme Court decision in Furman v. Georgia, which invalidated death penalty statutes in every retentionist state and led to a nearly ten-year moratorium on the death penalty.

[11][12] Luis Jose Monge's was the last execution both in Colorado and in the United States prior to the 1972 Supreme Court decision in Furman v. Georgia.