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:
MERCADO RIERA v. MERCADO RIERA et al. SAME et al. v. MERCADO RIERA.
Nos. 4256, 4264.
Circuit Court of Appeals, First Circuit.
April 9, 1948.
Rehearing Denied May 13, 1948.
Pedro M. Porrata and Benjamin Ortiz, both of Ponce, Puerto Rico, Edward J. McGratty, Jr., and Davis, Polk, Wardwell, Sunderland & Kiendl, all of New York City, Charles Cuprill Oppenheimer, for Mario Mercado Riera, Executor.
José A. Poventud, of Ponce, Puerto Rico, for Adrian and Margarita Mercado Riera.
Celestino Iriarte, F. Fernandez Cuyar and H. Gonzalez Blanes, all of San Juan, Puerto Rico, for Maria-Louisa Mercado Riera.
Before MAGRUDER, MAHONEY and WOODBURY, Circuit Judges.
WOODBURY, Circuit Judge.
These are cross-appeals from a final decision of the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico in proceedings on the final account of Mario Mercado Riera as testamentary executor of his deceased father’s estate. It is the accounting proceedings to which we referred incidentally as “raging in the insular courts” in our opinion on anothe'r phase of this bitter and long drawn out controversy between three of the decedent’s four children, heirs and equal residuary legatees. Mercado Riera v. Mercado Riera, 1 Cir., 152 F. 2d 86, 91.
The final account here in issue was submitted by the executor, now the ex-executor, in March, 1940, subject to supplementary accounts, and thereupon his brother and one of his sisters (the other sister has remained neutral throughout this sordid dispute) filed 19 objections thereto in the insular district court of Ponce. That court, after hearing testimony for 31 days and considering briefs totaling 700 typewritten pages, filed an opinion of 30 typewritten pages in accordance with which it entered a “final order or decree” modifying the executor’s account in 11 particulars, and as so modified, approving it.
Thereupon both the executor and the opposing heirs appealed to the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico — the former attributing 20 errors to the insular district court and the latter 13- — and submitted to that court a record consisting of 2,838 pages of testimony, 8S5 pages of documentary evidence, and briefs totaling 881 pages. The Supreme Court of Puerto Rico, remarking that “it will be seen that it has been no easy task to extract from that mountain of papers the very simple questions involved in this long and seemingly interminable dispute”, considered every one of the errors attributed by the parties to the district court in an opinion of .66 typewritten pages and an opinion on re-hearing of 15 typewritten pages. As a result that court entered a judgment modifying the “decision or final order” of the district court in 9 particulars, and as so modified, affirming it “without special imposition of costs.”
The ex-executor then appealed to this court under 28 U.S.C.A. § 225(a), Fourth, and the opposing heirs as appellees filed a motion under our Rule 39(b) to dismiss or in the alternative to affirm. Subsequently the opposing heirs also appealed, but the executor as appellee therein has never filed or asked to file á motion to dismiss or affirm similar to the one filed by the opposing heirs as appellees in the other appeal. However, this does not preclude us from dealing with both appeals at this stage since under our rule this court may “upon its own motion, dismiss the appeal or affirm the judgment appealed from where the law and justice of the case so require.” In our opinion the law permits and justice requires that the judgment of the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico should be summarily affirmed on both appeals.
Both parties as appellants, now apparently for the first time, assert the existence of a wide variety of questions of federal law. We have carefully considered their assertions and find them wholly unwarranted. Indeed we find them so unwarranted that it would serve no useful purpose even to catalogue them, far less to discuss them.
All that is presented by these appeals are pure questions of local law, and only two of them are of consequence. They are with respect to the executor’s compensation and with respect to the guardianship of a minor, and they are the two questions which the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico granted rehearing to consider more fully. Therefore both of these questions have received particularly careful and full consideration by the court appealed from. Not only can we discern no “clear or manifest” error, or anything “inescapably wrong” (De Castro v. Board of Commissioners, 322 U.S. 451, 458, 64 S.Ct. 1121, 88 L.Ed. 1384, and cases cited) in the decision of either of these questions of purely local concern, or of any of the multitude of other similar questions presented, but we cannot even discern any error at all in their decision. Indeed, an inspection of the record and a study of the painstaking opinion of the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico, in which all questions presented were carefully, even elaborately, discussed, leaves us with the firm conviction that a hearing on these appeals could not possibly disclose the existence of any error of sufficient magnitude to warrant reversal. Under these circumstances it seems to us that the law permits summary affirmance under our Rule 39(b) since a hearing on the appeals would clearly be futile (Mario Mercado E Hijos v. Commins, 322 U.S. 465, 466, 64 S.Ct. 1118, 88 L.Ed. 1396) and that justice requires summary affirmance in order to prevent further useless expense and delay in this already overly long and undoubtedly very expensive litigation. Appropriate orders will be entered in both appeals.
On this previous appeal we affirmed judgments of the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico ordering the executor to distribute .the estate in his hands according to the terms of a certain compromise contract executed by the four heirs and other interested parties on September 9,1938.

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

Choices:

Answer: 0