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:
John V. GIKAS, Defendant, Appellant, v. UNITED STATES of America, Appellee.
No. 5279.
United States Court of Appeals First Circuit.
Dec. 18, 1957.
Charles J. Isber, Boston, Mass., for appellant.
William J. Koen, Asst. U. S. Atty., Boston, Mass., with whom Anthony Julian, U. S. Atty., and Charles F. Barrett, Asst. U. S. Atty., Boston, Mass., were on brief, for appellee.
Before MAGRUDER, Chief Judge, and WOODBURY and HARTTGAN, Circuit Judges.
PER CURIAM.
The appeal here is from a judgment of conviction, pursuant to a jury verdict of guilty, after trial of appellant on an indictment charging, in five counts, violations of § 145(b) of the Internal Revenue Code for the taxable years 1945, 1946, 1948, 1949, and 1950. The Code section reads as f ollows:
“Any person required under this chapter to collect, account for, and pay over any tax imposed by this chapter, who willfully fails to collect or truthfully account for and pay over such tax, and any person who willfully attempts in any manner to evade or defeat any tax imposed by this chapter or the payment thereof, shall, in addition to other penalties provided by law, be guilty of a felony and, upon conviction thereof, be fined not more than $10,000, or imprisoned for not more than five years, or both, together with the costs of prosecution.”
Appellant urged many alleged errors at the trial which would require a vacation of the judgment of conviction, with a remand for a new trial. The government, in its brief, did not undertake to controvert some of these points and, in effect, conceded that appellant was entitled to a new trial. Accordingly, these points were not discussed by counsel at the oral argument; and in view of the government’s concession we shall not discuss such alleged errors in detail.
Appellant also urged that the district judge was in error in denying defendant’s motion for a judgment of acquittal “on the ground that the evidence is insufficient to sustain a conviction for the offence charged in the indictment.” Since, in appellant’s view, he was entitled to a judgment of acquittal at the trial, he urges us, in vacating the judgment of conviction, to send the case back to the district court with a direction to do what he should have done at the trial, namely, to enter a judgment of acquittal, thereby terminating the prosecution finally in the accused’s favor. Such point the government vigorously contested, and the argument before us revolved entirely about this contention.
Of course, under 26 U.S.C. § 145(b), the government had to show something more than that the taxpayer was deficient in payment of taxes lawfully due; it had to satisfy the jury, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the taxpayer’s understatements of his income were deliberately made in a “willful” attempt to evade taxes due. In order to narrow the factual issues, and to assist the accused in the preparation of his defense, defendant filed a motion for a bill of particulars, in which the government was asked to state “the specific item or items with respect to which the defendant’s returns were false and fraudulent as alleged in the Indictment.” To that inquiry the government’s reply was: “On each return the defendant claimed exemptions for dependents, to which exemptions he was not entitled.”
At the trial the government made no effort to prove that the taxpayer had claimed exemptions to which he was not entitled. Instead, the government concentrated on introducing evidence tending to show that the taxpayer had willfully failed to report taxable income in the form of dividends and capital gains which he had knowingly derived from a running account he had with the brokerage firm of Kidder, Peabody & Co. It does not appear that counsel for defendant ever claimed surprise at this shifting of the government’s position, and the Kidder, Peabody account was dealt with at length both in the arguments of counsel and in the charge to the jury. If it were reversible error for the trial judge not to have required the government to confine its proof to the willful evasions asserted in its answer to the bill of particulars, of course the most that appellant could hope to obtain on that score would be a reversal for a new trial.
In vacating the judgment of • conviction, there are two reasons why we have decided not to direct the entry of a judgment of acquittal:
(1) We think that there was sufficient evidence of willfulness, as charged in the indictment, in the failure of appellant to report as income any of the dividends or capital gains derived from the Kidder, Peabody account. The jury must have disbelieved appellant’s explanation that he, who posed as a “tax consultant”, thought that none of this was reportable income until he “received” it by actually withdrawing it from the Kidder, Peabody account, especially in view of the fact that when he did draw three checks on the account, in the total amount of $5,000.00, he did not report any of that either, or make any effort to ascertain how much of the $5,000.00 might represent income and how much might be a possible return of capital. We need not rehearse other reinforcing circumstances appearing in the record.
(2) Even if we thought that the motion for judgment of acquittal should have been granted, it is clearly not mandatory on us as an appellate court, though it is within our power, to direct the district court to enter a judgment of acquittal. See Bryan v. United States, 1950, 338 U.S. 552, 70 S.Ct. 317, 94 L.Ed. 335. See also, Yates v. United States, 1957, 354 U.S. 298, 327 et seq., 77 S.Ct. 1064, 1 L.Ed.2d 1356. Sometimes it may be thought that the government could easily supply missing elements of proof at a second trial, and that a direction for a new trial “may be just under the circumstances.” 28 U.S.C. § 2106. We think that it is so here.
A judgment will be entered vacating the judgment of the District Court, and remanding the case to that Court with direction for a new trial.

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