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:
UNITED STATES of America, Appellee, v. James Nathaniel GIBSON, Appellant.
No. 72-1697.
United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit.
Argued Oct. 30, 1972.
Decided Aug. 5, 1974.
Joseph B. Bullock, Alexandria, Va., (Henry B. Zachary, Alexandria, Va., on brief), for appellant.
Brian P. Gettings, U. S. Atty. (David H. Hopkins, Asst. U. S. Atty., on brief), for appellee.
Before HAYNSWORTH, Chief Judge, and CRAVEN and WIDENER, Circuit Judges.
This case was held in abeyance until May 13, 1973, pending the decision in the United States Supreme Court on that date in United States v. Giordano and United States v. Chavez.
HAYNSWORTH, Chief Judge:
Convicted of the illegal transmission of wagering information in violation of 18 U.S.C.A. § 1084, the defendant has appealed complaining of the district court’s failure to suppress evidence obtained from a tap upon the telephone of one Commings. The only claim of illegality in the Commings tap, is that probable cause for that tap was obtained in part from earlier taps on the telephones of one Mantello. The authorization of the Mantello taps was defective under Title 3 of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, and it is said that the suppressible information obtained from the Mantello taps infected the later Commings tap. Since the Mantello taps disclosed no information in any way implicating the defendant here, we conclude he has no 7 ^ standing to raise the question.
The problem presented is an after- ■ math of United States v. Giordano, 416 U.S. 562, 94 S.Ct. 1858, 40 L.Ed.2d 341 and United States v. Chavez, 416 U.S. 562, 94 S.Ct. 1858, 40 L.Ed.2d 380. The Mantello tap and the Mantello extension tap were authorized by the District Court for the District of Columbia Circuit upon an application which appeared regular upon its face and upon clear probable cause for it. The proceedings were defective under Giordano and Chavez, however, because the Executive Assistant to the Attorney General, rather than the Attorney General himself, was the authorizing officer. Thus anyone implicated by information obtained from the Mantello taps would have an apparent right to suppress the implicating information under the provisions of the statute. 18 U.S.C.A. § 2518(10)(a).
Gibson, however, was not implicated in any way by information obtained by the Mantello taps. Informed of it at the time, he would clearly have had no standing to suppress information which contained no allusion to him or to his conduct.
The Mantello taps, however, did provide information which in substantial part supplied probable cause for an application for, and authorization of, a tap on the telephone of one Commings. This application was properly processed in the Department of Justice, duly authorized by the Attorney General himself, and the District Court for the District of Maryland authorized installation of the tap. The Commings tap provided information implicating Gibson, which Gibson would now have us suppress.
The only arrow for Gibson’s bow is pointed at the regularity of the proceedings leading up to the Mantello taps. But with respect to those taps, he is not an “aggrieved person” within the meaning of the statute. 18 U.S.C.A. § 2518(10)(a). The clear implication of the statute is that an “aggrieved person” should not include one who is not implicated and against whom no one has made a proffer of information derived from the defectively authorized tap.
Nor does any generalized principle epitomized by the words “fruit of the poisonous tree” assist him. It is true that the Commings tap may never have been authorized but for the earlier Man-tello taps. Here, however, we deal not with fundamental constitutional rights, but with a technical procedural error in the Department of Justice which was readily correctible had its presence been recognized. It is not such a source of infection that one so remote as Gibson from it should be given standing to suppress information obtained from later taps upon the telephones of others as a result of proceedings in the Department of Justice which were not proeedurally defective. If, in some circumstances, protection of important constitutional rights or the inhibition of police misconduct may require suppression of the “fruit of the poisonous tree,” this is not such a ease.
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