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 "private business and its executives". 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:
THOMPSON et al. v. UNITED STATES.
No. 10949.
Circuit Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit
Dec. 9, 1944.
Rehearing Denied Jan. 13, 1945.
Howard Dailey, Geo. W. Harwood, and Kent D. Allen, all of Dallas, Tex., for appellants.
Joe H. Jones, Asst. U. S. Atty., of Dallas, Tex., for appellee.
Before SIBLEY, HOLMES, and McCORD, Circuit Judges.
HOLMES, Circuit Judge.
Appellants were found guilty of possessing whiskey knowing that it had been stolen from an interstate shipment, and of conspiring to receive the stolen whiskey. Their appeal challenges the sufficiency of the evidence to sustain their conviction.
The record contains direct evidence to establish that the whiskey was stolen from a shipment in interstate commerce, and that appellants thereafter took it into possession. The crucial point under both counts is whether the evidence proved beyond a reasonable doubt, and to the exclusion of every reasonable hypothesis of innocence, that they knew the whiskey had been stolen when they received it. Measured by this exacting standard, we think the evidence warranted the verdict of the jury.
According to the uncontradicted evidence, a truck with trailer attached, containing 500 cases of whiskey consigned from Illinois to New Mexico, was stolen from a motor carrier in Dallas, Texas, on the evening of November 14, 1943. At 1:30 a.m. on November 15th, this truck and trailer were in the yard of Mae Hatch’s home in Dallas, and Duane Smith was transferring the whiskey from the trailer to the ground. After it was unloaded, Smith drove the truck and trailer to a distant roadside and abandoned it. Mrs. Hatch, who had followed him, picked him up and brought him to where his car was parked. Smith told her that he would bring some men to help him move the whiskey from the yard into the house. Shortly thereafter, he returned to the home of Mrs. Hatch accompanied by the appellants, and the three men removed the whiskey from the yard into the bedroom of the house.
The work was finished before dawn without the benefit of lights on the lawn or in the bedroom, and Mrs. Hatch was cautioned to say nothing about the matter. She testified that the occurrence so frightened her that she was afraid to stay in the house; that she tried to persuade Smith to remove the whiskey immediately, knowing that it was “hot”; and that she left on a visit to Oklahoma City the following Thursday. An agent of the F. B. I. testified that the appellant Casten told him that some unidentified man came to Cast-en’s home about three o’clock on the morning of November 15th and told Casten that he knew where two or three hundred cases of whiskey were located that could be stolen. The appellants offered no evidence to explain their conduct.
The brief lapse of time between the separation of Mrs. Hatch and Smith and his reappearance at her home with the appellants suggests the likelihood of some prearrangement with them, as did his statement to her that he would bring some men to help him move the whiskey. The possession of so huge a quantity of whiskey of the same brand, and its surreptitious concealment in the early morning hours without benefit of lights, were fraught with suspicious implications.
The only reasonable inference from these unexplained actions, considered as a whole and in their relation to each other, was that the appellants knew the whiskey had been stolen at the time they took possession of it.
The judgment appealed from is affirmed.
This is the quantum of proof required in criminal cases depending upon circumstantial evidence. Paddock v. United States, 9 Cir., 79 F.2d 872; Kassin v. United States, 5 Cir., 87 F.2d 183; Copeland v. United States, 5 Cir., 90 F.2d 78; Cooper v. United States, 5 Cir., 91 F.2d 195.

Question: What is the total number of appellants in the case that fall into the category "private business and its executives"? Answer with a number.

Choices:

Answer: 0