Task: songer_r_natpr

What follows is an opinion from a United States Court of Appeals.
Intervenors who participated as parties at the courts of appeals should be counted as either appellants or respondents when it can be determined whose position they supported. For example, if there were two plaintiffs who lost in district court, appealed, and were joined by four intervenors who also asked the court of appeals to reverse the district court, the number of appellants should be coded as six.
In some cases there is some confusion over who should be listed as the appellant and who as the respondent. This confusion is primarily the result of the presence of multiple docket numbers consolidated into a single appeal that is disposed of by a single opinion. Most frequently, this occurs when there are cross appeals and/or when one litigant sued (or was sued by) multiple litigants that were originally filed in district court as separate actions. The coding rule followed in such cases should be to go strictly by the designation provided in the title of the case. The first person listed in the title as the appellant should be coded as the appellant even if they subsequently appeared in a second docket number as the respondent and regardless of who was characterized as the appellant in the opinion.
To clarify the coding conventions, consider the following hypothetical case in which the US Justice Department sues a labor union to strike down a racially discriminatory seniority system and the corporation (siding with the position of its union) simultaneously sues the government to get an injunction to block enforcement of the relevant civil rights law. From a district court decision that consolidated the two suits and declared the seniority system illegal but refused to impose financial penalties on the union, the corporation appeals and the government and union file cross appeals from the decision in the suit brought by the government. Assume the case was listed in the Federal Reporter as follows:
United States of America,
Plaintiff, Appellant
v
International Brotherhood of Widget Workers,AFL-CIO
Defendant, Appellee.
International Brotherhood of Widget Workers,AFL-CIO
Defendants, Cross-appellants
v
United States of America.
Widgets, Inc. & Susan Kuersten Sheehan, President & Chairman
of the Board
Plaintiff, Appellants,
v
United States of America,
Defendant, Appellee.
This case should be coded as follows:Appellant = United States, Respondents = International Brotherhood of Widget Workers Widgets, Inc., Total number of appellants = 1, Number of appellants that fall into the category "the federal government, its agencies, and officials" = 1, Total number of respondents = 3, Number of respondents that fall into the category "private business and its executives" = 2, Number of respondents that fall into the category "groups and associations" = 1.
Note that if an individual is listed by name, but their appearance in the case is as a government official, then they should be counted as a government rather than as a private person. For example, in the case "Billy Jones & Alfredo Ruiz v Joe Smith" where Smith is a state prisoner who brought a civil rights suit against two of the wardens in the prison (Jones & Ruiz), the following values should be coded: number of appellants that fall into the category "natural persons" =0 and number that fall into the category "state governments, their agencies, and officials" =2. A similar logic should be applied to businesses and associations. Officers of a company or association whose role in the case is as a representative of their company or association should be coded as being a business or association rather than as a natural person. However, employees of a business or a government who are suing their employer should be coded as natural persons. Likewise, employees who are charged with criminal conduct for action that was contrary to the company policies should be considered natural persons.
If the title of a case listed a corporation by name and then listed the names of two individuals that the opinion indicated were top officers of the same corporation as the appellants, then the number of appellants should be coded as three and all three were coded as a business (with the identical detailed code). Similar logic should be applied when government officials or officers of an association were listed by name.
Your specific task is to determine the total number of respondents in the case that fall into the category "natural persons". If the total number cannot be determined (e.g., if the respondent is listed as "Smith, et. al." and the opinion does not specify who is included in the "et.al."), then answer 99.

TUTTLE, Circuit Judge.
Appellants and four others charged as conspirators were convicted of a conspiracy to transport, possess, sell and transfer distilled spirits contrary to the provisions of the revenue laws and to have in their possession or custody a still without compliance with the statute. Only the named appellants appeal from their conviction and sentence.
Appellants rely entirely on their contention that the evidence was insufficient to sustain a conviction. We conclude that this contention must prevail on the basis of the record before us.
It is, of course, well recognized that a conspiracy to violate a federal statute may be shown to exist among several persons without the necessity of showing that each person had actual knowledge of the actions of each of his co-conspirators. This rule applies, however, only where there is sufficient evidence to permit the jury to find, in a circumstantial case, that the parties sought to be charged acted in some manner with respect to the criminal offense as to warrant the inference that there was an agreement among them to carry it out. An illustration of this kind of action appears in the per curiam opinion of this Court in Parmenter and Lincoln v. United States, 5 Cir., 279 F.2d 151, in which we said:
“As to Lincoln’s point, we need only say that we have carefully read the testimony to which our attention has been called in the briefs, touching on Lincoln’s actions. We conclude that the evidence clearly shows that his relations with Par-menter and others charged in the indictment and the manner in which he knew exactly how to fit into the part he was to play in receiving and paying for the final load of whiskey on terms which must have been the subject of prior agreement, spoke eloquently and convincingly of an agreement with Parmenter to be an important actor in the illegal possession and sale of the nontaxpaid whiskey. No more was needed to warrant submission of the case to the jury. Its verdict must therefore be sustained.”
See also Badon v. United States, 5 Cir., 269 F.2d 75, 79. In that case we said:
“A jury may reasonably infer the existence of an agreement and joint responsibility of a defendant in a prosecution for conspiracy from any substantial evidence that the defendant acted in furtherance of it with knowledge of the existence of an unlawful enterprise,” citing Pullin v. United States, 5 Cir., 1939, 104 F.2d 57, and cf. Alexander v. United States, 8 Cir., 1938, 95 F.2d 873, 874; Diehl v. United States, 8 Cir., 1938, 98 F.2d 545.
In this case the government’s case consisted of much proof of association, both at their home and elsewhere; of these appellants with persons who were in one way or another later identified as being connected with the illegal possession of nontaxpaid whiskey. The weakness of the government’s position, however, is that there is no single thread of identity running through the evidence which ties either the premises or any vehicle shown to belong to these appellants to either the premises or the vehicles in connection with which the unlawful operations were shown to have occurred. The testimony that several different automobiles were seen in the vicinity of appellants’ home and were later found with contraband cargo does not, of course, rise to the dignity of permissible proof that appellants “possessed” the nontaxpaid whiskey later found in these automobiles. There was no proof of the ownership of any of the automobiles that were actually found to be engaged in the illegal traffic.
This record demonstrates that these appellants spent much of their time during the period of the alleged conspiracy in company with proven bootleggers. . This fact, coupled with their game of “cops and robbers” in and around the area in which several stills were later found creates a strong suspicion that they had more than a passing interest in the stills and their product. Mere suspicion is, of course, not sufficient to warrant the submission of a criminal case to a jury. See in this connection Johns v. United States, 5 Cir., 195 F.2d 77, and Harms v. United States, 4 Cir., 272 F.2d 478.
The judgment of conviction must be reversed and the case remanded for a new trial.

Question: What is the total number of respondents in the case that fall into the category "natural persons"? Answer with a number.
Answer:

Answer: 1