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 "natural persons". 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:
Steve STUMBO, Petitioner-Appellant, v. William SEABOLD, Superintendent, Luther Luckett Correctional Complex, La-Grange, Kentucky, Respondent-Appellee.
No. 82-5500.
United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit.
Argued Feb. 24, 1983.
Decided April 13, 1983.
R. Neal Walker (argued), Kevin Michael McNally, Frankfort, Ky., court appointed, for petitioner-appellant.
Steven L. Beshear, Atty. Gen. of Ky., Eileen Walsh, Joseph Johnson (argued), Frankfort, Ky., for respondent-appellee.
Before KEITH, MERRITT and KENNEDY, Circuit Judges.
MERRITT, Circuit Judge.
Petitioner appeals from the District Court’s denial of his petition for habeas corpus relief under 28 U.S.C. § 2254. Petitioner was convicted in a Kentucky court of first degree murder, and given the minimum sentence of 20 years. He claims that he was denied due process of law under the fourteenth amendment by the Kentucky law allowing the victim’s family to hire a private prosecutor to prosecute the ease. Alternatively he alleges that even if the use of private prosecutors is not per se unconstitutional, the retained prosecutor in this case engaged in such gross misconduct that petitioner was denied a fair trial. The magistrate who originally heard this case recommended granting the writ on the ground of prosecutorial misconduct. The District Judge, however, denied the writ, finding that the prosecutor’s conduct, although improper, was not egregious enough to deprive the defendant of a fundamentally fair trial.
We do not believe that Kentucky law, which allows a privately retained prosecutor to assist the public prosecutor in criminal cases, constitutes a per se violation of due process. Many states have such laws, although they are rarely used. Petitioner argues that the private prosecutor has a single-minded goal of obtaining a conviction because his only ethical obligation is to his client (the victim or his family) while the public prosecutor’s duty is to seek “justice” on behalf of the state. Kentucky law, however, requires the public prosecutor to retain control over the conduct of the trial to ensure that the state’s interests are protected. Absent some evidence that the private prosecutor has in fact ignored the interests of justice in favor of seeking a conviction, his assistance of the public prosecutor is not a per se constitutional violation.
On habeas corpus review, the standard to be applied to allegation of prosecutorial misconduct is whether the petitioner was deprived of a fundamentally fair trial. Cook v. Bordenkircher, 602 F.2d 117 (6th Cir.1979). Our careful review of the record convinces us that in the context of this case, where the evidence of guilt was weak, the private prosecutor’s misconduct deprived the petitioner of a fair trial. We are concerned that a serious injustice may have occurred in this case, and we believe that there should be another trial, one in which the egregious acts of prosecutorial misconduct which occurred in the first trial are not present.
Every tribunal which has reviewed this case has agreed that prosecutor Burns’ conduct was highly improper. The Kentucky Supreme Court’s description of his misconduct clearly and concisely demonstrates the kind of tactics used by the prosecutor to obtain a conviction.
Instances of Mr. Burns’ misconduct cited by Stumbo include: calling the victim “the dead boy” on ten separate occasions during trial; repeatedly shouting at witnesses; flourishing the murder weapon in the faces of the jury and the witnesses; snapping the revolver’s trigger repeatedly while cross-examining appellant, calling appellant “Johnny Murder Boy”; calling the victim’s death an execution; referring to the offense as “cold-blooded murder” several times; calling appellant’s defense a “cock-and-bull story”; calling for a guilty verdict to prevent murder cases from being “stacked up” in Floyd County; stating to the jury during closing argument that appellant “committed the crime of murder, in our opinion”; asking questions of defense witnesses Mr. Burns knew would be denied and for which he knew no proof would be offered; and repeating questions previously ruled inadmissible. Appellant objected to each of the above instances.
Stumbo v. Commonwealth (file No. 80-SC-422-MR), Memorandum Opinion at 3.
We find especially egregious Mr. Burns’ attempts to suggest to the jury through cross-examination and final argument, the existence of a conspiracy to murder between the defendant and his cousin, when there was absolutely no evidence to support such a theory. (Tr. 261-62, 380) Also highly improper were Mr. Burns’ references to the defendant as “Johnny Murder Boy” (Tr. 379), and his statement to the jury that if they believed this “cock-and-bull story” murder cases would be “stacked up” in Floyd County. (Tr. 383)
Had the evidence of guilt been overwhelming in this case, prosecutorial misconduct might be considered harmless error. There was little evidence, however, to support the prosecution’s theory of intentional homicide and a significant amount of evidence to support the defendant’s claim of accidental shooting. The only evidence the State cited during oral argument to support the theory that the defendant intended to shoot the decedent was the testimony of one witness to the effect that defendant Stumbo walked up to the decedent and put the gun right up against his stomach, and then it went off. (Tr. 112) He was the only witness who actually saw the shooting occur. The testimony of the other two prosecution witnesses was ambiguous. Apparently they did not see exactly how the gun fired at the last minute and only heard the shot. All the witnesses admitted that (1) defendant Stumbo and the decedent were brothers-in-law and good friends, (2) the shooting occurred in the context of defendant attempting to break up a fight between his cousin and the decedent, (3) the cousin had cocked the gun before placing it on the seat of the car, and (4) immediately after the shooting, defendant Stumbo said, “Oh God, I didn’t know the gun was cocked.”
Since the issue of the sufficiency of the evidence under Jackson v. Virginia, 443 U.S. 307, 99 S.Ct. 2781, 61 L.Ed.2d 560 (1979), was not exhausted in state court nor raised by the parties, we have no occasion to rule on this issue. We do hold that in a case such as this, where the evidence of guilt is at best conflicting, prosecutorial misconduct such as that which occurred in the instant case, which tends to prejudice and inflame the jury, deprives the defendant of a fundamentally fair trial and deprives him of due process of law.
Accordingly, we reverse the decision of the District Court and grant the writ of habeas corpus, with orders that the State of Kentucky either release the petitioner or retry him within 90 days.

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

Choices:

Answer: 1