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 appellants in the case that fall into the category "private business and its executives". If the total number cannot be determined (e.g., if the appellant is listed as "Smith, et. al." and the opinion does not specify who is included in the "et.al."), then answer 99.

Opinion:
BECK v. McGRATH, Atty. Gen.
No. 202, Docket 21491.
United States Court of Appeals Second Circuit.
Argued May 2, 1950.
Decided May 19, 1950.
Hobart S. Bird, New York City, Lesser Brothers, New York City, for plaintiff-appellant, Rudolph J. Safarik, New York City, of counsel.
Ralph S. Spritzer, Washington, D. C, Harold 1. Baynton, Acting Director, Office of Alien Property, Washington, D. C., Adrian W. Maher, United States Attorney, District of Connecticut, Hartford, Conn., James L. Morrisson, Attorney, Department of Justice, Washington, D. C., for defendant-appellee.
Before L. HAND, Chief Judge, and CHASE and CLARK, Circuit Judges.
PER CURIAM.
The plaintiff is in the dilemma that, if the sale of the shares was not subject to a right of repurchase by Scheerer, the parties never came to any agreement at all; in either event the “vesting” order of the Alien Property Custodian was lawful. The suggestion of a sale first came from Scheerer in a letter written to Beck on November 6, 1939, which was ambiguous, and which we may disregard. On November 30, he followed this by a radio, proposing a sale “reserving the right to buy back.” This he had prefaced by two letters, dated November 29, in substantially the same terms, each confirming the radio of the next day. On December 2, 1939, Beck answered Scheerer’s radio, by a radio, declaring that any sale must be “bona fide without reservation at the same time old debt must be extinguished.” That obviously was not an acceptance of the offer contained in Scbeerer’s radio, but a counter proposal. When Scheerer got it, he at once answered by two letters of December 2, 1939, which differed in a material respect, for one of them contained the following passage: “I shall always be willing to reacquire the shares from you on a later occasion. Meanwhile I agree to effect the sale of the shares formally without reservation.” Beck could never be persuaded definitively to admit the receipt of that copy; which, although in form it was only of an option to Beck to return the shares, taken with what went before, seems to mean that Scheerer was adhering to his original proposal. Whatever it meant, clearly it meant only a “formally” absolute sale, and it was not an acceptance of Beck’s radio of the same day.
Moreover, assuming that Beck never did receive that copy, at best the sale had been made under a mistake as to its terms. Scheerer supposed that Beck knew any sale “without reservation” would only be “formal,” while Beck thought that it was to be “bona fide.” Thus, if it was a sale at all, it was subject to rescission by Scheerer. But the situation was worse even than that, because one of the terms of Beck’s radio of December 2 had been that the debt was to be “extinguished,” and it was clear that that had not been done, as was evident from Beck’s offer of $200. Possibly we might assume that Beck implicitly yielded that point, for he had received one copy of Scheerer’s letter of December 2, when he made his offer by the radio of December 20th. But that too did not clear up the ambiguities, for the copy of the letter of December 2, which he did get, not only contained a copy of Scheerer’s letter of November 29, which had in turn copied the radio of November 30, but itself contained language which was most inappropriate to a sale, “bona fide without reservations.” Scheerer said in that letter that he felt bound “to repeat again that it seems indispensable * * * that the common shares so far in my possession shall be transferred to American possession because of the possibility of America' * * * opening economic war against us.” If American law allowed a sale at a price below par, “then I agree of course that you yourself determine the purchase price.” Surely that was strange language if there was to be a genuine sale. We know that S cheer e'r did not intend one, and it must have been a surprise to Beck, even though he had never got the missing copy of the same date. Nor was the ambiguity cleared up when Scheerer on January 5, 1940, accepted Beck’s radio of December 20th. Thus even without the absent copy of the letter of December 2, the proof of a completed bargain was missing, or, if it could be spelled out from what Beck alone knew, would have been subject to rescission by Scheerer.
The simplest explanation is that both sides did not care about what the terms were, since they wanted no more than something to show, in case the United States became involved in the war; and perhaps also in case — as some passages in Scheerer’s letters make not improbable — the Reich itself sought to seize the shares. So Judge Smith found and it would be absurd to say that the finding was “clearly erroneous.” Therefore, we do not find it necessary to resort to the transfer of the patent, which was patently a sham. We do not mean that that transaction does not throw light upon the transfer of the shares; it does, and, as evidence, it was competent. But it was not conclusive, and although we deem it strongly corroborative, we hold that the result would have been the same without it.
Judgment affirmed.

Question: What is the total number of appellants in the case that fall into the category "private business and its executives"? Answer with a number.

Choices:

Answer: 1