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 "the federal government, its agencies, and officials". 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:
COMMONWEALTH OF THE NORTHERN MARIANA ISLANDS, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Young II KAWANO (aka Eiichi Sai) (aka Eiichi Kawano), Hideki Hanada, and Koichi Yoneda, Defendants-Appellants.
Nos. 90-10254, 90-10255, and 90-10256.
United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit.
Argued and Submitted Aug. 17, 1990.
Decided Oct. 16, 1990.
G. Patrick Civille, Moore, Ching, Boertzel & Lawlor, P.C., Agana, Guam, for defendant-appellant Hanada.
Timothy H. Bellas, Saipan, MP, for defendant-appellant Yoneda. '
James H. Grizzard, Saipan, MP, for defendant-appellant Kawano.
John F. Cool, Asst. Atty. Gen., Saipan, MP, for plaintiff-appellee Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.
Before GOODWIN, KOZINSKI and NOONAN, Circuit Judges.
NOONAN, Circuit Judge:
Hideki Hanada, Koichi Yoneda and Young II Kawano (aka Eiichi Sai) (aka Eiichi Kawano) appeal their convictions in the trial court of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (NMI or Commonwealth). The Appellate Division of the United States District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands affirmed their convictions. We vacate the judgment of the district court and dismiss the appeal for want of federal jurisdiction.
PROCEEDINGS
Hanada and Yoneda were convicted of • murder in the first degree in the killing of Hideo Shirigami and Kawano was convicted of the crime of principal to murder. They raise several challenges to the procedure at the trial including the claim that their right to confrontation, guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment, had been denied by the trial court’s curtailment of their cross-examination of the principal prosecution witness.
We are unable to reach the issues, however, if we lack jurisdiction of the appeal.
JURISDICTION
Our jurisdiction to review the district court depends on the existence of jurisdiction in the district court. Its jurisdiction has been challenged. Two separate legislative enactments from two different legislatures bear on this question.
48 U.S.C. § 1694b(a) reads:
Prior to the establishment of an appellate court for the Northern Mariana Islands the district court shall have such appellate jurisdiction over the courts established by the Constitution or laws of the Northern Mariana Islands as the Constitution and laws of the Northern Mariana Islands provide, except that such Constitution and laws may not preclude the review of any judgment or order which involves the Constitution, treaties, or laws of the United States, including the Covenant to Establish a Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands in Political Union with the United States of America (90 Stat. 263) (hereinafter referred to as “Covenant”), or any authority exercised thereunder by an officer or agency of the Government of the United States, or the conformity of any law enacted by the legislature of the Northern Mariana Islands or of any orders or regulations issued or actions taken by the executive branch of the government of the Northern Mariana Islands with the Constitution, treaties, or laws of the United States, including the Covenant or with any authority exercised thereunder by an officer or agency of the United States.
According to the statute, the jurisdiction of the appellate division, which is established by section 1694b(a), has only that jurisdiction which the laws of the Northern Mariana Islands provide. Accordingly we turn to the most recent legislation of the Northern Mariana Islands.
The Commonwealth Judicial Reorganization Act of 1989, Public Law No. 6-25, § 3109 (the Act) created the Supreme Court of the Commonwealth and vested in that court jurisdiction over all appeals from the trial court (renamed Commonwealth Superi- or Court). The Act specifically dealt with appeals pending in the Appellate Division of the District Court and transferred jurisdiction of them to the new Supreme Court so long as the final mandate of the Appellate Division had not been received by the trial court. The Act repealed 1 CMC § 3301 which had conferred appellate jurisdiction on the United States District Court.
By establishing an appellate court for the Northern Mariana Islands, the Act also rendered 48 U.S.C. 1694b(a) inapplicable because it only governs appellate jurisdiction “[pjrior to the establishment of an appellate court for the Northern Mariana Islands.” 48 U.S.C. § 1694b(a). Now that the Commonwealth has established an appellate court, we focus our attention upon section 1694c(a). Section 1694c(a) provides that for the first fifteen years following the establishment of such an appellate court, the Ninth Circuit shall have jurisdiction of appeals from all final decisions of the highest court of the Northern Mariana Islands that are grounded in United States law. Appellants claim the denial of their Sixth Amendment rights to confront their accusers provide both the Appellate Division of the United States District Court and this court with jurisdiction to review their case. This contention, however, cannot be supported in view of Section 1694c(a).
While appellants correctly assert that there is appellate review of federal cases following the establishment of the Commonwealth Supreme Court, this review is no longer vested in the Appellate Division of the District Court. Rather, the Commonwealth now requires appeals first to be filed before the court it has established pursuant to the Commonwealth Judicial Reorganization Act. Only when appellants have obtained a final decision from that court will the Ninth Circuit properly possess appellate jurisdiction only over those cases “involving the Constitution, treaties, or laws of the United States, or any authority exercised thereunder.” 48 U.S.C. 1694c(a).
In Wabol v. Villacrusis, 908 F.2d 411 (9th Cir.1990), we held the provisions of the Act that attempted to withdraw appellate jurisdiction from this court were void only in those cases where the appeal was currently pending before our court. Wabol may be distinguished because that appeal was properly before our court when the Act was passed; accordingly, the Act could not divest us of appellate jurisdiction. In this case, however, the appeal was filed after the creation of the appellate court for the Northern Mariana Islands. In view of the plain language in section 1694c(a), appellants must first exhaust their appeals before the Northern Mariana Islands courts before our appellate jurisdiction becomes operative.
In an informed and almost persuasive opinion the Appellate Division of the District Court pointed out that on the effective date of the Act “there was no functioning appellate forum, other than the Appellate Division, to be vested with jurisdiction through the timely filing of a notice of appeal. On May 3, 1989, the Commonwealth Supreme Court had no justices, staff, rules, or facilities; the Court existed only on paper.” For this reason the district court thought it should continue to hear the appeals pending before it. The motives of the district court were praiseworthy. It was acting in the spirit of this court in Gioda v. Saipan Stevedoring Co., 855 F.2d 625, 630 (9th Cir.1988) where retroactive application of the law was avoided to prevent manifest injustice in a pending case. But Gioda cannot be followed here.
Here the general rule prevails that the appellate court must apply the law in force at the time it decides the case. United States v. The Schooner Peggy, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 103, 110, 2 L.Ed. 49 (1801). There is no manifest injustice to the parties in so doing: the case is criminal with one litigant being the government; there is no one with vested rights; there are no new duties imposed. See Bradley v. School Bd., 416 U.S. 696, 717, 94 S.Ct. 2006, 2019, 40 L.Ed.2d 476 (1974). The district court did emphasize the sense of futility appellants before it might have in having prepared their appeals and then being sidetracked to a different court. This factor alone is insufficient to invoke the exception to Schooner Peggy. There is no danger that the appeal will be indefinitely delayed. The Commonwealth Supreme Court issued its first opinion some five months before the appellate division of the district court issued its opinion in this case, so it is clear that the ease was transferred to a functioning court and defendants’ appeal will be heard.
The Commonwealth had withdrawn appellate jurisdiction over its trial court from the district court. The district court had no jurisdiction and we have none.
VACATED and DISMISSED for want of federal jurisdiction.

Question: What is the total number of appellants in the case that fall into the category "the federal government, its agencies, and officialss"? Answer with a number.

Choices:

Answer: 0