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:
Robert W. HERRON, Appellant, v. MARYLAND CASUALTY COMPANY, Appellee.
No. 21269.
United States Court of Appeals Fifth Circuit.
June 8, 1965.
Roy Maughan, Maughan & Bankston, Baton Rouge, La., for appellant.
John S. White, Jr., Kennon, White & Odom, Baton Rouge, La., for appellee.
Before RIVES and WISDOM, Circuit Judges, and MORGAN, District Judge.
PER CURIAM.
The plaintiff below appeals from the district court’s granting of the defendant’s motion for a directed verdict under Rule 50 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
The plaintiff alleged in his complaint that he was seriously injured on November 20, 1961, when an employee of R. H. Harris Construction Company drove a truck into the front end of a caterpillar tractor, which the plaintiff was operating, which jarred the tractor and caused a large clod of earth to fall upon him from the front-end loader of the tractor. At the close of the plaintiff’s case, the district court granted the defendant’s motion for a directed verdict.
The trial judge may grant a directed verdict only when there is no evidence which, if believed, would authorize a verdict against the movant. The trial judge must draw against the movant all reasonable inferences most favorable to 1 the party opposing the motion. A corollary to this controlling principle is that the case should be submitted to the jury if the evidence is of such a character • that reasonable men in an impartial exercise of their judgment may reach different conclusions.
Drawing all reasonable inferences most favorable to the plaintiff, the following facts are established. From eleven until four-thirty o’clock on the day he was injured, the plaintiff was in the process of loading trucks with wet earth. The operation required the plaintiff to drive the caterpillar tractor into a pile of wet earth in order to fill a large bucket on the front of the tractor, raise the bucket and swing around and dump the wet earth into trucks which would pull under the upraised bucket. The loading operation occurred on an incline. The position of the caterpillar when the plaintiff dumped the earth into the trucks was down the incline from the trucks. The trucks pulled off the street to be loaded. The routine for loading the trucks, as described by the plaintiff, was that “I would go in [to the pile of earth] to get a load and I’d hit the hoist and shift it and then I am coming out, fighting the brake pedals, coming around and loading it on the truck.” As the plaintiff proceeded towards the street to meet the truck, he gradually lifted this bucket of earth. At the occasion of the accident, the plaintiff had moved over to the place where he met the trucks and stopped at full hoist “and the truck was coming under, and when he was coming under, that is the last thing that I remember.” The plaintiff sustained serious injuries when a large clod of wet earth fell on him from the full, upraised bucket. The force of the blow rendered him unconscious. When he regained consciousness, he saw that the arm of the end loader was “sitting down on the truck” and that one of the planks which had been placed around the truck’s bed, to increase the load capacity, had been broken by contact with the arm of the end loader. In answer to the question of whether he thought the truck had hit the front of the caterpillar, the plaintiff answered that “I wouldn’t say for sure or nothing, but I do believe from the depth of my heart, Roy, that the truck did hit the end loader; but I wouldn’t go to oath with it.”
We agree with the district court that the plaintiff has failed to prove that the truck driver negligently struck the caterpillar. In Louisiana, as elsewhere, the mere occurrence of an accident does not give rise to a presumption of negligence. In an action in tort in Louisiana the plaintiff has the burden to prove negligence as an affirmative fact. The mere statement of plaintiff’s belief does not support a reasonable inference that the truck struck the tractor. Certainly the plaintiff has not supplied facts which show that the truck driver negligently struck the tractor.
The judgment is therefore
Affirmed.
. The plaintiff also alleged that his injuries resulted through the negligent design or manufacture of the caterpillar tractor or its appurtenances. However, the jury returned a verdict for the defendant, Aetna Casualty and Surety Company, and against the plaintiff on this claim.
. Turner v. Atlantic Coast Line R. R., 5 Cir. 1961, 292 F.2d 586, 587.
. Minton v. Continental Ins. Co., La.Ct. App.1959, 110 So.2d 789, 797.
. Sumrall v. Aetna Cas. & Sur. Co., La. Ct.App. 1960, 124 So.2d 168, 174. It does not appear that evidence of the driver’s negligence may be supplied by the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur since the accident might have happened as the result of one of two causes: the plaintiff was on an incline and his tractor “rared back a little.” See Minton v. Continental Ins. Co., La.Ct.App.1959, 110 So.2d 789, 792, 796.

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