In 2014, Loya presided over the special court set up by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in Mumbai to decide whether Amit Shah, then Home Minister of Gujarat and now the president of the Bharatiya Janata Party, was involved in the death of a local gangster named Sohrabuddin.
In 2012, the Supreme Court had ordered the trial to be shifted from Gujarat to Maharashtra and for one judge to hear the case from start to finish.
Loya, however, was the second judge to hear the Sohrabuddin case after judge JT Utpat was transferred in June 2015, shortly after he had admonished Shah for failing to appear in court. Six months on, Loya died and his death was reported as a heart attack. Within weeks of Loya's death, MB Gosavi, the judge who replaced him, had exonerated Shah.