“Of My Friend Hector and My Achilles Heel,” by Michael Kauffman, is about a Jewish boy that makes

friends as a child with a Puerto Rican boy named Hector. The two boys were in different classes in
school; Michael was in the class for “intellectually gifted” children and Hector was not. As they grew up,
they saw each other but they rarely talked to each other. From Hector’s clothes, Michael assumed
Hector was a longshoreman, and thought “how strange and unfair fate had been with regard to the two
of us.” His assumptions about Hector were wrong: Hector was a leading Broadway actor. He reflects on
the ways that we judge people based on their education and their social and economic class. Kauffman’s
“Achilles heel” is the way that he judges and stereotypes people. His prejudice prevented him from
becoming close with Hector.
INTRO

“Mercy…for God’s sake, please let me go,” Mac says to Barbara Huttmann, his nurse. Mac is a bedridden
dying cancer patient with bedsores all over his body. He is a “sixty-pound skeleton” that had to be
resuscitated 52 times in one month. In “A Crime of Compassion,” the narrator Barbara Huttmann is
accused of being a murderer because she didn’t press the code button when he stopped breathing. As
nurse, she is obligated to follow the rules of the hospital: if someone stops breathing, she must call a
code. As a person, she doesn’t want to let Mac suffer. Barbara Huttman was a murderer by law, but not
by ethics. A murderer inflicts the cause of death. She didn’t cause his death. In a way, she was a
savior; she didn’t save his life, but she saved the patient from suffering and agony.

CONCLUSION

What is a “crime of compassion”? Breaking the law for someone’s well-being. Barbara Huttman stopped
a suffering life, which may make her a criminal by law, but compassionate by ethics.