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 "state governments, their agencies, and officials". 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.

Opinion:
Jimmy Seth PERRY, Petitioner, v. Dr. Stanley BLACKLEDGE, Warden, Central Prison, Raleigh, North Carolina, and State of North Carolina, Respondents.
No. 71-2198.
United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit.
Dec. 27, 1971.
Jimmy Seth Perry, pro se.
Jacob L. Safron, Asst. Atty. Gen. of N. C., Raleigh, N. C., for respondents.
Before SOBELOFF and BRYAN, Senior Circuit Judges, and WINTER, Circuit Judge.
SOBELOFF, Senior Circuit Judge:
Petitioner here seeks review of the District Court’s dismissal of his habeas corpus petition, brought under 28 U.S.C. § 2254, for failure to exhaust state remedies.
In 1969, Perry was brought to trial in the District Court for Northampton County on a misdemeanor charge — assaulting a fellow inmate at the Odem Farm Unit of the North Carolina Department of Corrections. Upon being convicted, petitioner was sentenced to six months, sentence to run consecutively to the sentence he was then serving.
Due to the consecutive nature of the sentence imposed, petitioner appealed his conviction to the Northampton Superior Court where, in accordance with North Carolina law, his earlier conviction and sentence were nullified and he was tried de novo. N. C. Gen. Stat. §§ 7A-290, 15-177.1 (1969). This time, for the same acts underlying the misdemeanor conviction, Perry was charged with the felony of assault with a deadly weapon. Petitioner pleaded guilty and received a sentence of from five to seven years. This sentence was the same length as one that the petitioner was already serving and was imposed concurrently with the preexisting sentence.
Perry now seeks federal habeas corpus, claiming that his constitutional rights were violated when, because he appealed from his misdemeanor conviction, he was subjected to a more severe sentence. See Rice v. North Carolina, 434 F.2d 297 (4th Cir. 1970), cert, granted, North Carolina v. Rice, 401 U.S. 1008, 91 S.Ct. 1256, 28 L.Ed.2d 544 (1971). Admittedly, petitioner has never presented his claim to the North Carolina state courts and, ordinarily, this fact alone would justify the denial of federal habeas corpus relief. Ganger v. Peyton, 379 F.2d 709 (4th Cir. 1967); Whitley v. North Carolina, 357 F.2d 75 (4th Cir. 1966).
However, the requirement that a state prisoner seeking federal post conviction relief must first exhaust his state remedies will not bar federal relief where resort to the state courts is but a futile exercise. 28 U.S.C. § 2254(b); Patton v. North Carolina, 381 F.2d 636 (4th Cir. 1967), cert, denied, 390 U.S. 905, 88 S.Ct. 818, 19 L.Ed.2d 871. This circuit has several times recognized that such futility exists where there are decisions of the highest state court directly against the claim of the petitioner and there appears no indication that the state court is inclined to change its position. Ralph v. Warden, 438 F.2d 786, n. 1 at 788 (4th Cir. 1970); Evans v. Cunningham, 335 F.2d 491, 493 (4th Cir. 1964).
In this case, the highest court of the State of North Carolina has, in the past year, spoken twice in unequivocal rejection of precisely the claim petitioner seeks to raise here. State v. Sparrow, 276 N.C. 499, 173 S.E.2d 897, 901-903 (1970); State v. Spencer, 276 N.C. 535, 173 S.E.2d 765, 770-773 (1970). The requirement of state remedy exhaustion does not compel petitioner to go through the empty formality of offering the Supreme Court of North Carolina an opportunity to reaffirm its already clearly established doctrine.
In view of the foregoing, we hold that the District Court erred when it granted respondent’s motion to dismiss Perry’s petition for failure- to exhaust state remedies. Accordingly, leave to proceed in forma pauperis is granted, a certificate of probable cause to appeal is granted, the judgment of the District Court is vacated and the case is remanded for further consideration of petitioner’s claim upon its merits. Inasmuch as the Supreme Court of the United States has heard argument in North Carolina v. Rice upon the same question as the petitioner raises in this case, the District Court is instructed to defer action until the Supreme Court has decided Rice.
Reversed and remanded.

Question: What is the total number of respondents in the case that fall into the category "state governments, their agencies, and officials"? Answer with a number.

Choices:

Answer: 2