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:
Alan C. SPRINGER, Appellant, v. UNITED STATES of America, Appellee.
No. 17691.
United States Court of Appeals Eighth Circuit. .
Feb. 2, 1965.
Alan C. Springer, filed typewritten brief pro se.
John O. Garaas, U. S. Atty., Fargo, N. D., and Gordon Thompson, Asst. U. S. Atty., Fargo, N. D., filed printed brief for appellee.
Before MATTHES, BLACKMUN and RIDGE, Circuit Judges.
PER CURIAM.
Alan C. Springer, along with others, was found guilty of violating the mail fraud statute, 18 U.S.C.A. § 1341. He appealed and we affirmed, sub nom. Butler v. United States, 317 F.2d 249, (8 Cir. 1963) cert. denied 375 U.S. 838, 84 S.Ct. 77, 11 L.Ed.2d 65 (1963). On April 2, 1964, Springer filed a motion under 28 U.S.C.A. § 2255 seeking to vacate the judgment of conviction on the grounds, (1) there was introduced and used as evidence in the trial, documents that had been “obtained illegally and without due process of law”; (2) that he had been denied his constitutional right to the assistance of counsel; (3) that he was induced through fear and promises not to take the stand and testify in his own defense.
Springer was returned from the Federal Correctional Institution, Texarkana, Texas, to Bismarck, North Dakota, and on April 27, 1964, a hearing was held on the motion to vacate and Springer and his court appointed lawyer participated therein. At the conclusion of the introduction of evidence, counsel for Springer informed the Court that “Mr. Springer has asked me to inform the Court that he has already served some time and that, to set the sentence aside or to vacate it, would be of no value to him nor to society; * * * that Mr. Springer’s position is that he would pray the Court for a reduction in the previous sentence imposed upon him.”
The motion to vacate was denied, and by this appeal Springer challenges the court’s action in denying the relief sought. Grounds (2) and (3), supra, of his motion to vacate have been abandoned, but Springer does assert that there was an illegal search and seizure of the records of Lenders Service Company, the bankrupt corporation of which he was president, and that such illegally seized records were introduced, to his prejudice, in the trial of the mail fraud case. In our view, the contention is devoid of substance. The undisputed facts are: In June, 1960 Lenders Service Company was adjudged a bankrupt in the United States District Court for Eastern District of Arkansas; the trustee in bankruptcy took possession of the books and records of the bankrupt company ; that as the legal custodian of such records the trustee delivered them to United States Postal Inspectors. Thereafter, and prior to the commencement of the trial such records were transmitted to Bismarck, North Dakota. The records were available to attorneys representing the defendants and parts or all of such records were examined and inspected by defendants or their respective attorneys at will. In this situation we fail to comprehend any basis for asserting that this evidence was the product of an unlawful search or seizure.
It is abundantly clear that at the time of the introduction of the claimed tainted evidence Springer was fully aware of the manner in which the records, were obtained, however, Springer and the other convicted offenders failed to raise the illegal search and seizure issue in their appeal from the judgment of conviction. This leads us to once again observe that a § 2255 proceeding does not serve the office of an appeal. Butler v. United States, 340 F.2d 63, (8 Cir. 1965) and cases there cited; Glouser v. United States, 296 F.2d 853, 856 (8 Cir. 1961). And it is settled that the question whether evidence was seized illegally ordinarily may not be successfully raised in a proceeding which constitutes a collateral attack on the sentence, but must be presented in the appeal from the conviction. In Peters v. United States, 312 F.2d 481, 482 (8 Cir. 1963), we stated: “Moreover, even if the conviction had been the product of a formal trial in which evidence derived from illegal search and seizure had been used to convict, any legal wrong involved in the admission of such evidence would, where, as here, the circumstances of the search and seizure were known to appellant at the time, have had to seek its correction through procedure other than a motion under § 2255.” Accord, Williams v. United States, 307 F.2d 366, (9 Cir. 1962). Finding no basis in the record for vacating the sentence, the order appealed from is affirmed.

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