Legal Question in Criminal Law in New Mexico

Re: false arrest

You could have a lawsuit for malicious abuse of process, but his arrest record will be there for a long time and getting it removed is a complicated and expensive project. The difficulty with lawsuits such as you describe is proving that your son suffered sufficient monetary damages [loss of job, etc] to make the investment of litigation costs worthwhile.

Re: false arrest

To answer your question "can we sue?", it will be necessary for me to have more information. If the officers reasonably believed that the "word of mouth" regarding the alleged forgery was true, they will probably be immune from being sued for money damages by your son. Not so the person that told them the false information.

Your question says that your son now has "a lengthy criminal record." Don't you mean that his only criminal record is this one case, but that it had a lot of charges, and they were all dismissed? In that case, he has a record of one arrest, no convictions, which is about the same thing as no criminal record at all. Or did I miss something?