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. John SUMNICHT, Defendant-Appellant.
No. 1075, Docket 87-1009.
United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit.
Argued April 29, 1987.
Decided June 29, 1987.
Mark C. Hansen, Asst. U.S. Atty., New York City (Rudolph W. Giuliani, U.S. Atty. for the S.D.N.Y., Kenneth Roth, Asst. U.S. Atty., New York City, on the brief), for appellee.
Phylis Skloot Bamberger, New York City (The Legal Aid Society, Federal Defender Services Unit, New York City, on the brief), for defendant-appellant.
Before FEINBERG, Chief Judge, KEARSE and WINTER, Circuit Judges.
KEARSE, Circuit Judge:
Defendant John Sumnicht appeals from a judgment of the United States District Court.for the Southern District of New York, entered after a jury trial before Thomas P. Griesa, Judge, convicting him of one count of mail fraud, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1341 (1982), and 13 counts of interstate transportation of stolen property, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2314 (1982). Sumnicht was sentenced to concurrent prison terms of one year and five months on the mail fraud count and on one of the transportation counts; on the 12 remaining counts, the court suspended the imposition of sentence and imposed concurrent two-year terms of probation. On appeal, Sum-nicht challenges only his conviction of mail fraud, contending that the evidence of mailing was insufficient to support his conviction on that count. Although the question is a close one, we conclude that the evidence of mailing was sufficient, and we affirm the judgment.
BACKGROUND
. The mail fraud count charged that Sum-nicht had caused fraudulent claims to be mailed to the Merrill Lynch brokerage firm seeking payment of interest on government securities of which Merrill Lynch was the registered owner. The pertinent evidence may be summarized briefly as follows.
Merrill Lynch was the registered owner of Ginnie Mae securities; after it had sold such securities, Merrill Lynch would continue to receive the interest payments until the new owners registered their ownership. As Ginnie Maes were actively traded, Merrill Lynch often did not know precisely who owned the Ginnie Maes that it had sold but that were still registered to it. Merrill Lynch would pay the interest it received on the sold securities to the new owners on request when they submitted claim forms that included certain information, including the due date, the interest rate, and the certificate number. Though much of the required information was publicly available, the name in which a Ginnie Mae was registered and its certificate number were not public information.
Sumnicht was the founder and owner of a company called Transplants For Life (“TFL”) in Madison, Wisconsin. In September 1983, Merrill Lynch received 13 claim forms from TFL seeking interest on Ginnie Maes. The forms contained all of the required information, including the certificate numbers, and Merrill Lynch accordingly sent TFL checks totaling $332,399.66. TFL did not own the Ginnie Maes and had no right to the interest payments.
The evidence that the TFL claim forms had been mailed was circumstantial rather than direct. There was no testimony from Merrill Lynch that these claim forms had arrived in the mail; the company would have accepted such claims whether received in the mail or by messenger; it was not Merrill Lynch’s practice to keep a record as to how a claim was received or to stamp the form in such a way as to indicate the manner of its delivery. The circumstantial evidence of mailing came from the testimony of two Merrill Lynch employees: the supervisor of the “principal and interest” department, which processed such claims, and the clerk who had received and processed the TFL claims. The latter testified that Merrill Lynch ordinarily received claim forms through the mail. The supervisor, who had worked at Merrill Lynch for 25 years, testified that claim forms from out-of-town companies were normally received by mail. He was not aware of any occasion on which a claim submitted by an out-of-town company had arrived at Merrill Lynch other than through the mail.
DISCUSSION
On appeal, Sumnicht emphasizes that the Ginnie Mae certificate numbers were not readily or publicly available and that there was no evidence as to how TFL had obtained that information; thus, as acknowledged by the government, there was a strong possibility that that information had come from inside Merrill Lynch itself. If a Merrill Lynch employee was a participant in the fraudulent scheme, it would have been as easy for the claims to be hand-delivered as for them to be mailed. Hence, Sumnicht argues that the government’s proof was insufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the claim forms were mailed to Merrill Lynch. We disagree.
In considering a claim that the evidence was insufficient to support a conviction, the appellate court is required to view the evidence in the light most favorable to the government. Glasser v. United States, 315 U.S. 60, 80, 62 S.Ct. 457, 469, 86 L.Ed. 680 (1942). We must credit every inference that could have been drawn in the government's favor, United States v. Bagaric, 706 F.2d 42, 64 (2d Cir.), cert. denied, 464 U.S. 840, 104 S.Ct. 133, 78 L.Ed.2d 128 (1983), and affirm the conviction so long as, from the inferences reasonably drawn, the jury might fairly have concluded guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. United States v. Taylor, 464 F.2d 240, 244-45 (2d Cir.1972). These principles apply whether the evidence being reviewed is direct or circumstantial. See Glasser v. United States, 315 U.S. at 80, 62 S.Ct. at 469.
The evidence here was ample to permit the jury to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Merrill Lynch had rarely, if ever, received a claim form from an out-of-town company other than through the mail. Further, the jury could have inferred from this fact that, although it might have been convenient for an accomplice within Merrill Lynch to hand-deliver the claims, such an accomplice would not wish to deliver them in a manner that would invite special attention to them, thereby imperiling the success of the scheme. Nor would such an accomplice wish to take the risk of calling attention to his own connection with these claims. Thus, viewed in the light most favorable to the government, the evidence was sufficient to permit the jury to infer beyond a reasonable doubt that an accomplice within Merrill Lynch would have taken pains to see that the fraudulent TFL claims arrived in the same manner as virtually all other claims from out-of-town companies, i.e., by mail.
United States v. Srulowitz, 785 F.2d 382, 387 (2d Cir.1986), relied on by Sumnicht, is distinguishable. In Srulowitz we ruled that the government's proof of mailing of a particular letter was insufficient; but there the government produced no evidence of the customary transmittal practices or experiences of either the author of the letter or its addressee, and the letter had been found only in the files of the author's attorney. There was no evidence that it had ever been delivered to the addressee, much less delivered through the mail.
In the present case, in contrast, the claim forms were received by the addressee and the evidence was compelling that it would have been unusual for such forms to arrive other than by mail. In all the circumstances, we cannot conclude that the evidence was insufficient to support the jury's finding that the TFL claim forms had been sent to Merrill Lynch by mail.
CONCLUSION
The judgment of conviction 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